XP Refugee With Questions

[mraub1]

I’ve just ordered a 24” iMac to replace an aging WinXp machine. Apple’s current ads are distinctive and clever, but they really should emphasize that for anything above a base level PC appliance, Mac’s are price competitive with a WinXP machine of similar capabilities, and that’s going to be even more true with the increased hardware requirement of Vista. Plus, iMac’s are probably what computers are supposed to be, just a simple powerful machine with no rat’s nest of wires and boxes, like I now have sitting on my floor. My purchase has encouraged me to start a long needed clean-up of my computer room.

Anyway, I have a couple of questions. Yes, I did do a search and may have answers to my questions, but prefer to ask them to fit my circumstances, since I may be interpolating information incorrectly.

1. My first question is the most important. I have 100+ GB of photo files on an external USB drive formatted NTFS. My first thought was to transfer them to internal drives and then reformat the USB drive FAT32. I couldn’t free up enough space on my internal drives, so I now have to come up with Plan B. My reading indicates that my iMac will be able to read the NTFS USB drive, but not write to it. My iMac will have plenty of free drive space (I upgraded to the 500 GB HD) and I wonder if I can copy the files from the USB drive to the iMac drive and then reformat the USB drive to FAT32 with the iMac and then copy the files back to the USB drive. Will this work?

2. How finicky is the DVD/CD drive in the iMac? I’ve had some PC DVD writers which were very picky about what brands of discs they would write to.

3. Is it easy to get connected to the internet via DSL on the iMac? I have AT&T DSL service with a modem which is generally referred to as a bridge. I’ve never paid too much attention to things like IP addresses and domains and wonder if there are things I ought write down from my XP machine before I disconnect it from the internet.

Thanks for any help. I suspect I’m going to be a frequent visitor here, at least for the first few weeks.

MIKE

 

[Eraserhead]

1. My first question is the most important. I have 100+ GB of photo files on an external USB drive formatted NTFS. My first thought was to transfer them to internal drives and then reformat the USB drive FAT32. I couldn’t free up enough space on my internal drives, so I now have to come up with Plan B. My reading indicates that my iMac will be able to read the NTFS USB drive, but not write to it. My iMac will have plenty of free drive space (I upgraded to the 500 GB HD) and I wonder if I can copy the files from the USB drive to the iMac drive and then reformat the USB drive to FAT32 with the iMac and then copy the files back to the USB drive. Will this work?

Probably, but it might not. If you have any problems then the most reliable way I've found to do this is to enable remote access on the Mac, (System preferences==>Sharing==>Remote Access) and to download WinSCP to the PC and do it via SSH. (You will need the Mac's IP address which you get from System Preferences==>Network to do this.)

2. How finicky is the DVD/CD drive in the iMac? I’ve had some PC DVD writers which were very picky about what brands of discs they would write to.

I've not had any problems.

3. Is it easy to get connected to the internet via DSL on the iMac? I have AT&T DSL service with a modem which is generally referred to as a bridge. I’ve never paid too much attention to things like IP addresses and domains and wonder if there are things I ought write down from my XP machine before I disconnect it from the internet.

It will probably just work if it's ethernet, otherwise you'll need Mac drivers no need to worry about IP addresses.

 

[madog]

You'll have no problems copying files from an NTFS formatted windows disk but like you said your mac cannot write to it.

The earlier disk drives/super/combo drives were picky eaters but have gotten better with each development. Anything major like maxtor or imation it won't have any problems with [as far as blank discs go] but I'm not sure about Costco/CompUSA brand cheapo-discs.

I just got AT&T DSL about a month ago myself and once you run the setup cd it comes with [pc or mac] then there shouldn't be any problems. What the setup does is change the settings to the modem itself allowing it to do all the dialup procedures [PPPoE] and allowing your mac/router to be set up as regular DHCP. Shouldn't be any harder than plugging it in and possibly power cycling the modem [unplug for a few minutes]. Then again I just have a regular dynamic setup [as opposed to static] so I'm not sure what you have.

 

[zephead]

1. Yes.

2 & 3. I don't burn many discs, nor do I use a bridge, sorry that I can't answer those.

edit: Wow I totally got beat to the punch. Probably because I'm typing this from my phone.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

1. Yes it will work, but will be slow as crap over USB1. If the drive has USB 2 it wont be too bad. Firewire would be way faster if available, but so would ethernet

2. stay away from elcheapo blank disks.....not worth the hassle or the few pennies diff in price

3. If the modem has ethernet jacks, you probably wont need any drivers for it. Plug & play most likely, unless AT&T has been wonkin the firmware or something. PPPoE kernel extensions are built into Tiger

welcome to the boards & the mac world. come back anytime, we're here for ya

"XP refugee" hahahaha.....like Tom Petty said "you dont have to live like a Refu gee eee" You can run it on your iMac too

 

[mraub1]

Thanks for the prompt and helpful replies. My drive is USB2, so it shouldn't take too long.

I'm really looking forward to this adventure. The two programs I use most for digital image processing, Photoshop and DXO, either are or soon will be out in universal binary format. Both could choke the life out of my PC when running together, but I think I'll get dramatically better performance out of the iMac with these apps. Plus, the Mac user interface is still light years ahead of anything Windows can offer.

MIKE

 

[mraub1]

As it turns out, USB 2 is also pretty slow too. When I dragged the 100GB of files from the USB drive to the pictures folder it estimated 30 hours for the transfer. I let it transfer away all night long and it was actually down to a 15 hour estimate this morning. It may be complete by the time I get home from work. I wonder if OS X has to do some translation in the process of getting the NTFS files onto the Mac HD. I hope it's not going to take another 30 hours to get the files back on the USB drive after I've reformatted it to FAT32.

MIKE

1. Yes it will work, but will be slow as crap over USB1. If the drive has USB 2 it wont be too bad. Firewire would be way faster if available, but so would ethernet