External hard drive and newbie mac questions

[sjohnson4382]

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I have just gotten a Macbook and am wanting to get an external hard drive to store my photos, itunes music, and videos on. What would be agood one to get for this? Or a few good ones?

Also I am wanting to print wirelessly from my macbook and also be able to do so from my wife's pc laptop? How do I go about doing this. Right now we have a canon pixma id6700d for pictures and about a 5 year old hp 1200psc all in one for all other stuff.

thanks in advance

 

[spunklemonkey]

Hard drives, Id personally get a firewire one as there meant to be faster for larger files, but there more expensive, so a usb 2.0 one will do just as well. Id get a buffalo or western digital as they have served me personally well, but others will like different makes. Obviously a USB one will just plug in and act like a hard drive with no fuss, I think firewire is similar but you can boot things from firewire. Thats if you have a firewire port.

You could also get an existing hard drive and buy a caddie for it, saving money.

For network printers. Being a mac newbie myself my advice may be rubbish. I think youd obviously need the printer physically setup to your mac (via usb usually).

1) Go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES > SHARING then you can see printer sharing, just tick that
2) In windows, go to printers, then add printer,then browse
3) click and expand the windows network, workgroup should appear then the printer
3) choose that printer
4) It asked me for a driver, so I chose cancel (as it wanted me to pick one so I did) then selected my printer driver
5) done, printer should appear in windows to use. (mac will need to be on when printing from laptop obviously)

 

[i.shaun]

Assuming the mac has drivers for the printer, it should be fine. If not, see if it has anything close that works.


I wirelessly print from both my XP laptop and iMac to a Brother HL-1230 series laser printer connected to the Airport Extreme Base Station (router).



If you can find a similar router it should work fine, or even a wireless printer that connects to the wireless network like a computer would. Once on the network, the computers should be able to pick it up.