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Transition from Window to Mac

M

mbastudent

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 15, 2012
5
0
Hi everybody, I just got my first Macbook after hesitating about moving away from Windows ecosystem for a very long time. Everything is new to me and the trackpad is AMAZING, which no Windows ultra book can compete against. (Mine is Macbook Air 2012 the 128 base-model).

Despite the fact that I am willing to learn, I still have a hard time to have a smooth transition into Mac OS X. So I figure I can get some help here:

- Since I still need to use Windows, I will have Bootcamp for my Win 7. Due to the limited space on the Air, I bought a 1TB 3.0 USB portable Hard drive from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00834SK5W/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00). I know that the hard drive needs to be formatted properly in order to share file between Mac and Windows. I read several articles about the pros and cons of each format and attempt to format them like this:

+30%: NTFS: for Windows
+30%: HFS+ for Mac
+40%: exFAT for file storage because it can be shared between Mac and Windows

Given above plan, do you have any suggestion or correction for me?

2. Is there any way I can free up some space on my already limited MBA?

3. One of the key on my keyboard, the ".", gets stuck. (Ugh!) I just bought my MBA last week from Amazon, will AppleStore give me an exchange or fix it for me? :(

Thank you very much!
 
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I will intend to run mostly MS Office (Word, Excel, Access), SQL, some other database program for my computer class at university, Quickbook and other like-wise Accounting software. In addition, I would like to run some old PC game, too!
 
Office exists for the Mac, as for the other stuff it's not modern gaming so you might want to consider...
Parallels, VirtualBox, WineBottler or any other emulator.

As for the external, just use exFAT. Unless you want a Time Machine backup then you need an HFS partition too.
 
From your laptop SSD, i would make 35 gb for windows, 35 gb for mac, and 35 gb fat partition.

For the external hard disk, I would make it 100% fat32, not exFAT.
 
vistadude said:
From your laptop SSD, i would make 35 gb for windows, 35 gb for mac, and 35 gb fat partition.

For the external hard disk, I would make it 100% fat32, not exFAT.
Click to expand...

Yes, absolutely. The only reason not to use fat32 is if you have a drive over 2Gb. Otherwise stick with a single fat32 partition that both OS's can read and write to happily.
 
Thanks for all the input. Any reason behind not having exFAT? I thought it works with both OS X and windows.
 
mbastudent said:
Thanks for all the input. Any reason behind not having exFAT? I thought it works with both OS X and windows.
Click to expand...
exFAT is INCOMPATIBLE with default Windows XP and Vista (pre-SP2) installations. It does, however, work with Windows 7 just fine. OS X has supported exFAT since 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard).
 
tillsbury said:
Yes, absolutely. The only reason not to use fat32 is if you have a drive over 2Gb. Otherwise stick with a single fat32 partition that both OS's can read and write to happily.
Click to expand...

plenty of files these days are over 2 GB - any HD movie, for example.

All drives, of course are over 2Gb, but that's not what you meant. :)
 
NewbieCanada said:
plenty of files these days are over 2 GB - any HD movie, for example.

All drives, of course are over 2Gb, but that's not what you meant. :)
Click to expand...

D'Oh, I meant 2Tb, not 2Gb. Sorry! And you're right in that there's a file size limit, but it's 4Gb, and that is something that might come up (but usually only if you're torrenting Blu-ray movies and you wouldn't be doing that surely would you...

ExFAT does work fine in Windows 7 and OSX, and can be made to work with an upgrade to XP SP2. I'm using it for my 3Tb external drive. But for under 2Tb FAT32 is usually ok.
 
tillsbury said:
D'Oh, I meant 2Tb, not 2Gb. Sorry! And you're right in that there's a file size limit, but it's 4Gb, and that is something that might come up (but usually only if you're torrenting Blu-ray movies and you wouldn't be doing that surely would you...

ExFAT does work fine in Windows 7 and OSX, and can be made to work with an upgrade to XP SP2. I'm using it for my 3Tb external drive. But for under 2Tb FAT32 is usually ok.
Click to expand...

You can easily do that if you're ripping your own blu-rays. Or DVDs for that matter!
 
The problem with ex-fat is it requires a patch to work in XP, and if you have a laptop crash and need to use another computer to get your data, your only choice might be XP without the patch.

Of course nowadays most pc's have vista or 7, so ex-fat should be okay.
 
Just formatted it last night. Working great. I'm trying to boot camp win7 with iso file
 
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