First iMac owner.A few questions and help

[hollywood334]

I bought my first mac ever off ebay. Its an older model imac 20 eyesight with 2gb ram, 250 hd, and 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. First off is there anything I need to know. It came with Leopard 10.5.5 installed and so far ive downloaded 10.5.6, 10.5.7, and running 10.5.8 and the new sarfari for leopard.

1. First question is could i install snow leopard on it? not sure about wanting to go to lion yet, really dont know the difference since this is only my 3rd day on a mac. but i know i need snow leopard for app store.

2. It says i have 160GB left, where can i go to see whats taking up so much memory? Since i installed 3 updates for leopard are all them still taking up space of when i installed the newer one does the older one get deleted? i do have 24 movies on it.

3. I have a netbook that is synced to my ipad 2 and iphone 4. how can i transfer my itunes library without an external hard drive.

i think this is all for now. i can say that im very impressed by the mac operating system being a first time user.

 

[obsidian1200]

I bought my first mac ever off ebay. Its an older model imac 20 eyesight with 2gb ram, 250 hd, and 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. First off is there anything I need to know. It came with Leopard 10.5.5 installed and so far ive downloaded 10.5.6, 10.5.7, and running 10.5.8 and the new sarfari for leopard.

1. First question is could i install snow leopard on it? not sure about wanting to go to lion yet, really dont know the difference since this is only my 3rd day on a mac. but i know i need snow leopard for app store.

2. It says i have 160GB left, where can i go to see whats taking up so much memory? Since i installed 3 updates for leopard are all them still taking up space of when i installed the newer one does the older one get deleted? i do have 24 movies on it.

3. I have a netbook that is synced to my ipad 2 and iphone 4. how can i transfer my itunes library without an external hard drive.

i think this is all for now. i can say that im very impressed by the mac operating system being a first time user.

1. Yes, you can install snow leopard. You need to if you ever want to install Lion, anyway. All you need to do is get your hands on a DVD; amazon.com still sells them.

2. Did you perform a clean install of leopard? (this means booting with the optical disc and formatting the internal drive as an Mac OS Extended (journaled)) If not, it's possible the last owner left some files on the hard drive. I'd recommend doing this if you haven't.

3. To transfer files, you'll need to enable file sharing between your iMac (found in System Settings>Sharing, check the file sharing option) and your netbook (assuming Windows, you should be able to simply transfer your files over a wireless signal), or alternatively, you can use Migration Assistant and an ethernet cable between the two computers. You might be able to use the ethernet connection instead of a wireless one, but I'm not sure.

Hope this helped.

 

[hollywood334]

1. Yes, you can install snow leopard. You need to if you ever want to install Lion, anyway. All you need to do is get your hands on a DVD; amazon.com still sells them.

2. Did you perform a clean install of leopard? (this means booting with the optical disc and formatting the internal drive as an Mac OS Extended (journaled)) If not, it's possible the last owner left some files on the hard drive. I'd recommend doing this if you haven't.

3. To transfer files, you'll need to enable file sharing between your iMac (found in System Settings>Sharing, check the file sharing option) and your netbook (assuming Windows, you should be able to simply transfer your files over a wireless signal), or alternatively, you can use Migration Assistant and an ethernet cable between the two computers. You might be able to use the ethernet connection instead of a wireless one, but I'm not sure.

Hope this helped.

Thanks didnt want to buy Snow Leopard and it not work or be buggy since its an older imac.

2. No i didnt do a clean install. All i received was the imac. no disk or anything.

3. Thanks, Ill give this a try and look up Migration Assistant

 

[rkaufmann87]

Thanks didnt want to buy Snow Leopard and it not work or be buggy since its an older imac.

2. No i didnt do a clean install. All i received was the imac. no disk or anything.

3. Thanks, Ill give this a try and look up Migration Assistant

You can still do a clean install, however you will either need replacements of the original DVDs. Apple can get them to you for a nominal cost. However I'd probably just get Snow Leopard and do the clean install from that. Before you do a clean install back it up using Time Machine or by creating a bootable clone using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. You will need an external HD though which I'd strongly recommend to backup the system. A 1tb drive is pretty inexpensive.

You cannot use Migration Assistant, it is intended for migrating Mac to Mac. In other words if you have an older Mac and got a new machine you can use MA (or my recommendation Setup Assistant) to migrate data, apps, settings, etc... You can only migrate from MS Windows if you have Lion installed.

 

[obsidian1200]

You cannot use Migration Assistant, it is intended for migrating Mac to Mac. In other words if you have an older Mac and got a new machine you can use MA (or my recommendation Setup Assistant) to migrate data, apps, settings, etc... You can only migrate from MS Windows if you have Lion installed.

Huh, my bad. For some reason I recalled that you could use the assistant with windows transfers, even with earlier versions of OSX. The ethernet/wireless transfer should still work just fine. Also, as mentioned above, a 1tb drive would be a good investment, even just for back-ups. It would certainly make moving files from one device to the other a breeze (doing this and backups requires you to partition the drive).