08-07-2011, 09:38 AM

Switched in the spring. Still discovering plusses and minuses. Found another plus this morning.

I had been using my Time Capsule as an external hard drive to manually store backups of files in addition to Time Machine backups, but heeded advice to dedicated the TC to TM. I had a Windows-formatted external hard drive on my old PC that I plugged into the new iMac and formatted for Mac using Disk Utility. That was a nice experience after the more fiddly procedures in Windows.

But then after copying my GBs of manually backed up data from the TC to the newly formatted external hard drive, I discovered that (of course) OneNote, which is running fine under Windows in Parallels, could not sync to the Mac format (doh!). The solution, I discovered after a quick google, was simply to add a partition to the external hard drive and format it MS-DOS FAT. That was the delightful Mac experience: I launched Disk Utility, dragged up the lower border of the Mac-formatted partition on the EHD to make it smaller and create a new blank partition, then formatted that new partition to MS-DOS FAT. It took just a few minutes, and now OneNote is syncing happily to that new partition.

This is the kind of convenience I was looking for when I switched to Mac. I could have done similar things under Windows, but not nearly as conveniently, and not without buying a 3rd party utility.

08-07-2011, 12:44 PM

Well, how do you like "Demapples"? Glad to hear you've got everything working in your favor!

08-07-2011, 07:49 PM

I switched a few months ago. I'll never go back! I'm almost to the point where I can do everything on my macbook pro that I did on my high powered pc. I find that I have the pc powered down most of the time.

08-08-2011, 11:07 PM

Originally Posted by afriqueart

I switched a few months ago. I'll never go back! I'm almost to the point where I can do everything on my macbook pro that I did on my high powered pc. I find that I have the pc powered down most of the time.

I know exactly what you mean, I rarely fire up my PC now. It's a Lenovo Thinkpad 15 inch that's only 2 years old. I think I might sell it eventually.

Regards,

PatM

08-10-2011, 04:31 AM

Disk Utility is definitely one of the more geeky tools I enjoy on OS X!

08-11-2011, 06:26 PM

I bought this MBP to replace a mid-2009 model. What's odd is that since that time, I have barely used my 6-core Windows desktop at all. Before I'd always jump between Windows and Mac based on what I was doing at the time. Now, I'm only using Windows at work (because they won't let us use Macs - claim they aren't secure and are incompatible with Crtrix-based apps).

08-12-2011, 12:53 AM

Originally Posted by dmccloud

(because they won't let us use Macs - claim they aren't secure and are incompatible with Crtrix-based apps).

This will come as a huge surprise to both Apple and Citrix.

(the tyranny of IT departments -- it's why I can never work for a corporation)

08-15-2011, 06:24 PM

@chas_m I think IT is not savvy enough to setup stuff on mac. Our IT department (Fortune 500) does not allow mac as that will increase their work load by distributing apps for multiple platforms, but you are allowed to get a MAC (from work) just don't expect to get any support...

I hope that changes for good...

08-15-2011, 06:34 PM

Its the little things you keep finding that makes the mac experience better, my latest discovery (after 19 months) is holding down any vowel key when typing in pages will give you a choice of accents, brilliant.

08-15-2011, 07:38 PM

Originally Posted by bazanders

Its the little things you keep finding that makes the mac experience better, my latest discovery (after 19 months) is holding down any vowel key when typing in pages will give you a choice of accents, brilliant.

I didn't know that - and not just in pages - it must work everywhere because it works making a post here.

08-15-2011, 07:41 PM

Is that right? Well I'll be. Cheers for that!