Time Machine

Hey all, i am not a new mac user for i have a imac desktop however, i just bought my first apple laptop. i purchased a macbook and am lovin it. I tried to setup an external hard drive and this time machine deal popped up. so hit ok. Now i am not sure what time machine is and everytime i hook up my external hard drive it pops up. Is my hard drive still a regular hard drive just labeled time machine. sorry if this is confusing to anyone for i am confused too. any help would be great. Thanks.

Time Machine is a program.. it backs up your data every hour to whatever disk you set it to (though IMO it's designed with the Time Capsule in mind). Doing this then allows you to 'go back in time' to a certain point in the back-up - say last Thursday or whatever, if you lose data or if something goes horribly wrong.

Your external should just be a normal drive with the Time Machine back up image stored on it.

so how do i get rid of it as being set on my ext. hard drive. i have looked with now results though.

Go to the Time Machine preferences and just turn it off.

Or if you want to back up to somewhere else, go to the Time Machine preferences and click 'Change Disk...'.