new mac user with questions

;D Hi there, just a few questions

1) is it really worth the .mac subscription, the ichat looks great its just that the handful of my friends and family who have macs don't seem to have .mac subscriptions so i cannot ichat them unfortunately.

also when my .mac 60 day trial subsciprtion runs out what will happen? Will i lose my apple ID ??

2) my macbook only has 60gb as advertised worse still it says in the system profile that there is only 55gb and only 37gb is available is this fair? Any way to increase this if i need to?

But on the whole i am extremely pleased with my mac and won't ever by another PC again as long as i live.

you dont need to purchase .mac to use ichat do you?

i dont understand number 2 but you can easily upgrade your external hardrive as 60gb is not enough

But on the whole i am extremely pleased with my mac and won't ever by another PC again as long as i live.

Click to expand...

glad to hear it

wave said:

;D Hi there, just a few questions

1) is it really worth the .mac subscription, the ichat looks great its just that the handful of my friends and family who have macs don't seem to have .mac subscriptions so i cannot ichat them unfortunately.

also when my .mac 60 day trial subsciprtion runs out what will happen? Will i lose my apple ID ??

2) my macbook only has 60gb as advertised worse still it says in the system profile that there is only 55gb and only 37gb is available is this fair? Any way to increase this if i need to?

But on the whole i am extremely pleased with my mac and won't ever by another PC again as long as i live.

Click to expand...

1) I had a .mac once, and its really only worth it if you have multiple macs or you are on a network with other macs.

2) Mine came with 80gb. First time I started it up, I found that there was 60gb available. So, I guess this is a common issue, but you can buy external hard drives if you find you dont have enough memory.

I've had my mac for a year and have only used 10gb (i'm at 50.51 right now). So there's no need to worry, unless your going to be doing HUGE projects or MASS downloading.

OS X takes up space on your hard drive so you don't really get the advertised hard drive space.

When you purchase a product like a laptop or desktop you never get the advertised GB's of space. This is common among all laptop - desktop manufacturers.

Hard drive companies advertise hard drives using the decimal system. As in 60 GB is 60 x 1,000,000,000 bytes when in fact this is not totally true because computers do not work with decimals when it comes to hard drive space. A computer when using the binary prefixes thinks GB is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes. So a true gigabyte is actually just over 93% of the advertised one.

You 60GB will result in 55.879 GB of usable space. Then you have to take into account of OSX, trial software, additional languages and all the drivers that are installed on you new macbook. By removing most of the languages with a program like delocalizer you can free up another 2-3 GB. Not much but it will help. Also Iwork and Office.Mac are trial software that can be deleted if not needed.

I never got a .mac subscription, however if ichat is the only thing you want it for you can also register with a free AIM account and it works. I've only screwed around with it a little bit though.

As for your hard drive, they are easy enough and usually cheap enough to upgrade yourself should you need to. If you don't want to go through with having to reinstall OSX all over again external hard drives are great and usually quite affordable.

I have a 60gb HD and I'm already down to <10gb left after just a year. I do quite a bit of movie editing and have a whack of mp3's on here that take up alot of space. Not to mention podcasts seem to take up alot of room.