Okay, I am new, but I just need a little help.

Hey everyone, I just got a new 20-inch iMac 4 days ago. I love it cuz the graphics are so cool, its so fast, and it has a superdrive. I also love it cuz it is virtually invulnerable to viruses and spyware, and to uninstall something, I just have to trash it instead of going through that whole Add-and-Remove programs thing. But, just like with any new machine, I have a few problems:

-Whenever I try to type an apostrophe or a slash, I get this: è (Seriously, ***)
-I canèt (see what I mean) play Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 in wide screen without toning down the resolution, but I am pretty sure I used to be able to.
-Is it possible to display the contents of a web page (not the actual web page itself, but the contents) larger, like zooming in.

Please reply. I may add more things later on.

I'm new too, but your apostrophe problem sounds similar to a thread I read somwhere the other day.. I think you can check it in system prefs>international>language, make sure that english is first in the languauges then>input menu, and be sure that the US check box is checked and mine also has character palette is checked..

hope that helps..

wahdiatme said:

I'm new too, but your apostrophe problem sounds similar to a thread I read somwhere the other day.. I think you can check it in system prefs>international>language, make sure that english is first in the languauges then>input menu, and be sure that the US check box is checked and mine also has character palette is checked..

hope that helps..

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Thanks, that helped. Another thing I want to know: When I ordered the iMac, I ordered a 160 GB hard drive. When I got it, it said I only had 138 GB available. Now, I understand that the operating system and all the programs take up space, but I don't see why it would need 22 GB of space. And in the system profiler, it said it only had a 149 GB capacity. Can anyone tell me what's going on, and if it's possible to increase the storage space?
One more thing: I'd like to learn how to use XCode (I have a little knowledge in computer science). Thanks.

I'll warn you up front that XCode is a tough program to find resources on. I've been using it for my computer science class (I'm an engineering student) and I've found almost no documentation on it online. HOWEVER...XCode's internal documentation is exhaustive and extensive. Unlike in the Windows world, when you click on "Help" in most applications, you truly get a full help file.

Anyway, I've learned XCode well enough to use it on a daily basis so if you have any questions on it, just let me know (private message).

On the HD issue: Hard drives always lose some capacity when formatted. (Do a Google search for "formatted capacity" for more info) My "60GB" HD becomes a 55.9 GB one when formatted. Assuming that 7% is a typical figure, then that gets you down to 149 GB. (BTW: Use the File>Get Info command on any disk or folder to see the combined size of its contents. Look around for anything disproportionately large, just in case.)

To zoom web pages, Safari has a "Make Text Bigger" command in the View menu (Command-+). Most other browsers have a similar command, as well.

Yeah, if you get a 10GB ipod, you actually get a 9,2GB one.

actually apple and many other harddrive manufacturers (sony, toshiba etc.) have been sued about this for false advertising (i mean they could just make 10,8GB ones and then sell them as 10GB ipods right?)

Yep.

witeshark said:

Also about the hard drive: does it have iLife, and Garageband?

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Yes, it does. I can't wait to get a MIDI so I can do some home recording with Garageband.
PS: Thanks for that info, technologist. It kinda pisses me off, though. It's not really a big deal now, but if I fill it up with tons of software, I might need an external firewire or USB drive. It's a'ight now, though.

One other thing: Whenever you play music on your computer, a link to it appears in your iTunes library. When that happens, is the file copied, or does iTunes just make a shortcut, like an alias, which doesn't take up more disk space?

Well, garage band is a huge program...so that automatically takes up quite a big bit o space on your hd..I think it's almost 2 gig alone....

The Trooper said:

One other thing: Whenever you play music on your computer, a link to it appears in your iTunes library. When that happens, is the file copied, or does iTunes just make a shortcut, like an alias, which doesn't take up more disk space?

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The file is copied, so it does indeed take up additional space.

To clarify about the harddisk size issue, a COMPUTER defines one gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 Bytes, whereas harddisk manufaturers define a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes...thats a 73,741,824 byte difference. To put it into better perspective, most folks consider on megabyte to be 1,000,000 bytes (which is incorrect as well, its actually 1,048,576 bytes) so thats about 73 megs of lost space. Multiply that by 160 and thats about 11,680 megs (or 11.6 gigs) of lost space defining a meg as 1,000,000 Bytes...it comes out a bit closer to 11 gigs even defining it properly, but thats where you space discrepincy comes in to play. To make things worse, filesystems do incur some overhead so when a file says its only 300 bytes long, you also have to take into account how much overhead the FS is using which is why in WindowsXP (I can't remember if the other variants do it or not) if you go to the properties of a file you will see a file size statistic and a size on disk statistic. These definition discrepincies are pretty common as as drives get larger and the discrepincy becomes more noticable fewer and fewer folks are going to stand for it...image a 1TB drive. It would show up as 931 Gigs due to mis-defining a gigabyte...that would not make me happy at all , anyhow I hope that helped out a little

secondshadow ther is a little more to it. If you look at physical partition (pp) sizes. That is where you lose all of physical disk space. The pp can be in the other of 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. This number is used in defining the space available when a filesystem is created on a disk drive. You have to use the correct one in order to get the most out any given drive. this is some that most consumers don't care about. The problem get worse when you create files on your system. A small file say 1mb, could take up more space than the 1mb, depending on the pp size used.

We may have better control in this area, as Apple continues to work on there journal file systems. Which I think will happen in OS X server.

secondshadow said:

These definition discrepincies are pretty common as as drives get larger and the discrepincy becomes more noticable fewer and fewer folks are going to stand for it...image a 1TB drive. It would show up as 931 Gigs due to mis-defining a gigabyte...that would not make me happy at all , anyhow I hope that helped out a little

Click to expand...

That really sux.

Well there's really no way around it as files need their space plus the indexing that tells the system what is it and permissions etc...

witeshark, it has nothing to do with files needing indexing, etc. All of that information is stored in a central journal file. The problem lies in that all formatted file systems require sector and cluster sizes, or "nodes" in Linux. Thus if you have very large nodes, a tiny file will waste a lot of space. Very small nodes, will cause massive fragmentation when you have a large file.

The best solution is to find a good median and stick with it.

Your tag SUX

Okay, witeshark, I wasn't going to say anything at first, but I think it's obvious you need help. You HAVE TO DO SOMETHING about your signiature. Honest to God, I have repeated the phrase over and over in my head and still can't make any sense of it. I understand that you are trying to trash-talk Microsoft, and I praise you for it. But if you can't speak coherently, people won't take you seriously. No offense.