Buying an iMac next week. Got a few questions.

Hey everyone I've been a lurker/semi poster on this forum and I'm finally making the switch next week. It's that time of the year when we get our tax returns and I will be using part of mine to buy a 24" 2.4GHZ iMac. I plan on buying two 2gig stick of RAM from OWC or Newegg and replacing them with the stock 1gig ram. This will be my first apple computer and I'm pretty stoked about it. I'm buying it for primarily for photography, photoshop and some minor video editing. But as many first time buyers I have many questions that needs to be answered and I hope all of you can help me. Well here they go.

1. I want to run Window on my mac for my wife so I'm buying Fusion VMware. I want to know if I can allocate 15 or 20gig HD space just for Windows for a few programs or it will automatically do it for me?

2. Timemachine... How does it exactly work when backing up data? I want to buy an external 500g firewire 800 drive for photos/music/video. Can I allocate lets say 50g of HD space on the external drive just for time machine and 450gigs rest for storage? How does that exactly work?

3. How does Wold of Warcraft run of the 24" iMac? I'm a casual gamer and that is the only one besides Warcraft 3 I play on my current Windows machine. I'm not looking at graphic intensive games like Cyrsis. As long I can play WoW without any frame rate issues I'm happy.

4. I have an external 19" Viewsonic LCD laying around that I want to hook up to my iMAc. I read that the glossy screen can cause some issues when printing out photos and such. Let's say if I hook up my external 19" monitor to my iMac can I run World of Warcraft on that monitor and then apps like Safari, Photoshop, Garageband on my iMac monitor? Is that even possible?

5. I've read that Leopard comes with tons of printer drivers and language packs that are hardly ever used. How do I get rid of them to free up hard drive space? I know I wont be using the language packs and I will only be using one type of printer for my mac.

6. Will the 2.4ghz model be sufficient to do video editing? I'm not going to be doing any type of HD video editing just regular video editing. I'm not worried about Photoshop or Aperture because I know it can run them flawlessly.

Well that's all for now. Thanks!

Mantronix said:

Hey everyone I've been a lurker/semi poster on this forum and I'm finally making the switch next week. It's that time of the year when we get our tax returns and I will be using part of mine to buy a 24" 2.4GHZ iMac. I plan on buying two 2gig stick of RAM from OWC or Newegg and replacing them with the stock 1gig ram. This will be my first apple computer and I'm pretty stoked about it. I'm buying it for primarily for photography, photoshop and some minor video editing. But as many first time buyers I have many questions that needs to be answered and I hope all of you can help me. Well here they go.

1. I want to run Window on my mac for my wife so I'm buying Fusion VMware. I want to know if I can allocate 15 or 20gig HD space just for Windows for a few programs or it will automatically do it for me?

2. Timemachine... How does it exactly work when backing up data? I want to buy an external 500g firewire 800 drive for photos/music/video. Can I allocate lets say 50g of HD space on the external drive just for time machine and 450gigs rest for storage? How does that exactly work?

3. How does Wold of Warcraft run of the 24" iMac? I'm a casual gamer and that is the only one besides Warcraft 3 I play on my current Windows machine. I'm not looking at graphic intensive games like Cyrsis. As long I can play WoW without any frame rate issues I'm happy.

4. I have an external 19" Viewsonic LCD laying around that I want to hook up to my iMAc. I read that the glossy screen can cause some issues when printing out photos and such. Let's say if I hook up my external 19" monitor to my iMac can I run World of Warcraft on that monitor and then apps like Safari, Photoshop, Garageband on my iMac monitor? Is that even possible?

5. I've read that Leopard comes with tons of printer drivers and language packs that are hardly ever used. How do I get rid of them to free up hard drive space? I know I wont be using the language packs and I will only be using one type of printer for my mac.

6. Will the 2.4ghz model be sufficient to do video editing? I'm not going to be doing any type of HD video editing just regular video editing. I'm not worried about Photoshop or Aperture because I know it can run them flawlessly.

Well that's all for now. Thanks!

Click to expand...

1. Yes. You choose how much to allocate, at least that is how it works in boot camp.
2. Every hour or so it reads what has "changed" on your system and updates it on your back up, i'm not sure if you can allocate 50gb for backup or not.
3. I've heard it runs great, you could probably search "world of warcraft mac" on youtube and see some examples.
4. Yes, you could have a dual monitor system and run different apps in different windows.
5. During Leopard install, there was an option to not install them, if leopard is already installed, i'm sure you can find a folder called printer drivers by doing a spotlight search or something of the sorts.
6. OF COURSE!!!

being more specific on #2
it is possible. I would give time machine a little more than 50gb thought (I would give it more like 100gb)
you would need to partition the drive first using disk util...
one partition would be for you, and the other would be for time machine

if you were to partition, say, 100 GB strictly for Time Machine use and then find out later that you need to raise that to 150 GB, can this be done or is the drive "set" once you choose the initial amount?