Help - Mac rookie questions

[Auld Grey Loon]

Hi. I am about to order an imac for our home. I will have to continue to use my PC notbook for a while longer but will ultimatly change that over to mac when it needs replacing in about another year. A have a few questions that I am wondering about.

1. I want the imac in the kitchen where I spend my time, but I want to put the modem, printer and everything in a room out of site. Is a time capsule the answer to this? Or should I consider an airport extream with a usb hard drive for back ups. Or have I misunderstood these products and need putting right?

2. I am going to order the higher spec 20" as the 24" is just too big for where it needs to be. Is 2GB a lot of RAM in a mac, is it worth upgrading to 4 or is that over the top for a home user that does not do any gaming?

3. I am split between iwork and office for macs. The fact that office gives more that one install makes me think it might be cheaper in the long run when I buy a macbook? Any advice.

I will no doubt be back for more help when it arrives and I need to get my 4 ipods converted from my PC to mac but that will have to wait.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.
Dave

 

[Scarlet Fever]

1. I want the imac in the kitchen where I spend my time, but I want to put the modem, printer and everything in a room out of site. Is a time capsule the answer to this? Or should I consider an airport extream with a usb hard drive for back ups. Or have I misunderstood these products and need putting right?

The time capsule will only be useful if you want to back stuff up. If you want to do wireless backups, go for the time capsule. They are awesome little things.

2. I am going to order the higher spec 20" as the 24" is just too big for where it needs to be. Is 2GB a lot of RAM in a mac, is it worth upgrading to 4 or is that over the top for a home user that does not do any gaming?

2GB is fine. I do some photoshop work on my 2 year old MacBook with 2GB RAM and it works well for me.

3. I am split between iwork and office for macs. The fact that office gives more that one install makes me think it might be cheaper in the long run when I buy a macbook? Any advice.

In my experience, iWork gives you much better looking documents, and they are much easier to create, but office has 100% compatibility with office documents created on PCs.

On the topic of price, though, I think a family pack of iWork is cheaper than a 3-license copy of Office, isn't it?

Hope I helped

 

[emptyCup]

1. I want the imac in the kitchen where I spend my time, but I want to put the modem, printer and everything in a room out of site. Is a time capsule the answer to this?

Time capsule will allow you to attach a printer to it. If by modem you mean cable modem, and not telephone modem, it will do that too. It will also handle your backups.

If you plan to put the iMac on the counter, under cabinets, make sure the iMac will fit. Best wishes.

 

[AdeFowler]

Hi Dave and welcome,

I'd opt for the Time Capsule personally. That way as well as having your printer etc tucked out the way, you'll have a great back up solution in place via Time Machine. One thing to note however, neither the Time Capsule or Airport Extreme have an ADSL modem built in, so you'll have to hook up an existing router or buy a cheap modem Like this.

I bought the student/Home edition of Office from Amazon for £87 with free delivery. I don't have iWork so can't compare, but with Office you do in theory get cross platform compatibility.

2gb of RAM is ample for most tasks, but upgrades from Crucial are usually very reasonable and installation is very easy.

 

[OlBlueHair]

Good advice here but whatever you do, don't buy RAM from apple as it is very overpriced.

 

[Auld Grey Loon]

Thanks for the pointers. I am going to order it off the apple website later.

Dave

 

[H$R]

I would buy iWork, good product for a good price. There's also an open source alternative: Neooffice.org. Like openffice.org you might have heard of. Does read and save Microsoft office documents pretty good mosty. So I just use those two and didn't even really bother to look at Office. Though my sister is almost only using Office for Mac. But I am more an open source guy.

For printing I just use an wireless HP printer, to which every Mac/Windows and Linux machine in my house can connect to. For backups, I have external USB harddrived and a 1 terabyte NAS server.

But Time capsule cought be good enough for you, I didn't really look at it so close. I am pretty happy with my setup, because there where my router is, there is not enough space for a printer, so the printer is just in another room.