new to os x, have a few questions

[suyenfung]

hi everyone. i bought os x when it first came out. doing mostly audio work i was hoping there'd soon be drivers for my hardware. well no drivers came. anyway now that osx support from the major audio companies is on teh horizon i reinstalled os x to get familiar with it. i just ordered the 10.1 upgrade cd today (i wasn't keeping up when it came out), so for now im stuck on 10. first and foremost on my g4 450/768 mb ram the os is pretty sticky. i know this has been somewhat remedied in the 10.1 upgrade. what kind of performance boost can i expect? also, what's with these "desktop folder"s everywhere? what purpose are they serving? can i safely delete them (im the anal type)? also i'm getting a stupid "invalid domain" error everytime i try to send a message with mail. i think it's referring to the domain of address im sending to but the addresses have been right. anyone know what's up with that? and how come i'm being locked out of some system prefs? when i try to change the startup disk the lock to change settings is greyed out although im logged in as the administrator. can anyone recommend a good newsreader that supports the yenc encoding format? oh and finally i have two hard disks, one is partitioned in three (os9, osx, osx storage (mp3s, pictures, movies, etc)) and the other is strictly for my audio files. say i want to erase and reinstall osx on the osx partition without erasing the os9 and osx storage drives, how would i do that? basically how do you format one partition and not the other? whoa i know thats a lot of questions but if anyone could help me i would be most appreciative and i promise to do my best to help others here from now on.....thanks for reading.

 

[TheT]

Re: new to os x, have a few questions

what's with these "desktop folder"s everywhere? what purpose are they serving? can i safely delete them (im the anal type)?

MacOS 9 stored data that was on the Desktop in an invisible "desktop folder" on the HD, but in OSX, you can see that folder... so, when you don't have anything in there, throw it away

and how come i'm being locked out of some system prefs? when i try to change the startup disk the lock to change settings is greyed out although im logged in as the administrator.

It's a weird thing, I know, but you have to click on the lock and enter your admin password again... it's just another security feature, so nobody messes with your settings after an auto-login as admin

Allright, that's all I know, I hope that helped a little bit...

 

[suyenfung]

thanks!

 

[AmbitiousLemon]

updating will fix most of the weird security issues. Dont even fool around with it until you get the upgrade in the mail. It will make you feel a lot better about OSX.

Also I would suggest reading a series of article put out by Insanely-Great.com They have a series on the differences between os9 and osx that is really good for newbies.

link

link

Mail, go to your Mail preferences/accounts, and make sure your account is setup correctly (click edit to check your account's details.

OSX can be a bit of a shock after 9, expecially when going into 10.0. Just read those articles and sit tight waiting for that 10.1 disk, it will be a world of difference. (be sure after installing the 10.1 update that you run the software update preference panel (apple almost never gives yo the latest os when you buy a new computer or buy the os; yes they are bastards like that, when i bought my powerbook it had 8.6 on it even though 9 was out, and when i bought my imac it had 10.1.2 even though 10.1.4 was out)