bazza_g Posted November 8, 2008 Report Share Posted November 8, 2008 I finally stopped messing about and have purchased a Macbook Pro this afternoon - a few questions to the Apple guru's on here.... - which is better to run Windows - this bootcamp thing or VMWare? - any applications/downloads that are a must? - is there an easy resizer for batches of photo files? - is there msn messenger/skype for mac? My next mission is to move all my itunes and photos - am going to try my big external HDD so fingers crossed the mac can read it! ... I feel like a fish out of water! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ritey Posted November 8, 2008 Report Share Posted November 8, 2008 Yes there is Skype for the mac, yes you can get apps to work on a mac for MSN, either MSN for mac or one of the many others. VMWare (or Parallels) will give you more virtual options than bootcamp but I guess it will depend on how many other os's you'll need/want. Preview can do photo editing including resizing out of the box and comes natively with Leopard Enjoy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazza_g Posted November 8, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 8, 2008 nice one! the good news is my external USB HDD appears to work ok with the macbook - now copying all my stuff off my work laptop Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chav Posted November 9, 2008 Report Share Posted November 9, 2008 bazza - you need parallels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muppetboy Posted November 9, 2008 Report Share Posted November 9, 2008 Welcome to the club Bazza You'll need to be a bit patient though, well that's what I found anyway coming from donkeys years of Windows "Inquisitor" is a great little add on Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hopsta Posted November 9, 2008 Report Share Posted November 9, 2008 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted November 9, 2008 Report Share Posted November 9, 2008 I have Bootcamp for a small Windows XP/Vista (well currently Windows 2008) - I don't often boot into it though. VMWare allows you to boot your Bootcamp partition as a virtual machine - works pretty well. Also, on the Bootcamp partition install something like Mediafour | MacDrive - it allows you full read/write access to a HPFS partition. Essentially then you only need a small partition for your Windows Bootcamp stuff and you can store all your data on the OSX partition. The only time I use Bootcamp natively really is when doing demos etc. that involce audio & video conferencing. Other than that using it via VMWare is perfectly fine - the UNITY view shows up your Windows apps in the toolbar similar to a normal Mac application. Get spaces/Expose set up - it's fantastic My must have apps: :- Office 2008 :- Omnigraffle (Like Visio for OSX) :- Firefox, obviously :- Dashboard plugins :- Text Wrangler - Text Editor for coding :- VMWare Fusion :- Paragon NTFS for MAC OS X - full read and write access to Windows NTFS partitions under Mac OS X NTFS for Mac. This gives you native access to NTFS partitions for read-write. By default you can only read. Also, don't install the NTFS 3g plugin - the performance is absolutely dire if you want fast read/write access to NTFS. :- Photoshop Elements 6 :- Disco for CD/DVD authoring :- Filezilla - FTP client :- Flip4Mac WMV support in Quicktime player :- iAntiVirus - I don't have this running all the time. I just do regular checks. :- MacPar Deluxe for file compression (Think similar to WinRar) :- MOZY for online automatic backups :- ONYX - System utility :- Quicken 2007 - obvious usage. :- Tinkertool - System tool for modifying system environment :- Transmission Bittorrent client :- Wallet - password database :- Xbench - Benchmarking tool The interface on OSX does take a while to get used to - and no matter what people say Finder is just not a patch on explorer. But other than that you'll find the environment great to work in It's a great platform for virutalisation. While in general I don't find OSX as snappy and quick as well setup Windows machine you will find that you get a far more consistent performance experience, which is personally more important to me. Oh, and a big thing for performance, swap the hard disk out for a 7200RPM unit - makes loads of difference. Well did for me anyway - I installed a 320Gb 7200RPM drive in my macbook and it's made it a lot snappier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazza_g Posted November 9, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 9, 2008 cheeeeers you fecker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazza_g Posted November 9, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 9, 2008 I have Bootcamp for a small Windows XP/Vista (well currently Windows 2008) - I don't often boot into it though. VMWare allows you to boot your Bootcamp partition as a virtual machine - works pretty well.Also, on the Bootcamp partition install something like Mediafour | MacDrive - it allows you full read/write access to a HPFS partition. Essentially then you only need a small partition for your Windows Bootcamp stuff and you can store all your data on the OSX partition. The only time I use Bootcamp natively really is when doing demos etc. that involce audio & video conferencing. Other than that using it via VMWare is perfectly fine - the UNITY view shows up your Windows apps in the toolbar similar to a normal Mac application. 50% of what you said went straight over my head whilst the other 50% went even further over, but cheers Get spaces/Expose set up - it's fantastic My must have apps: :- Office 2008 :- Omnigraffle (Like Visio for OSX) :- Firefox, obviously :- Dashboard plugins :- Text Wrangler - Text Editor for coding :- VMWare Fusion :- Paragon NTFS for MAC OS X - full read and write access to Windows NTFS partitions under Mac OS X NTFS for Mac. This gives you native access to NTFS partitions for read-write. By default you can only read. Also, don't install the NTFS 3g plugin - the performance is absolutely dire if you want fast read/write access to NTFS. :- Photoshop Elements 6 :- Disco for CD/DVD authoring :- Filezilla - FTP client :- Flip4Mac WMV support in Quicktime player :- iAntiVirus - I don't have this running all the time. I just do regular checks. :- MacPar Deluxe for file compression (Think similar to WinRar) :- MOZY for online automatic backups :- ONYX - System utility :- Quicken 2007 - obvious usage. :- Tinkertool - System tool for modifying system environment :- Transmission Bittorrent client :- Wallet - password database :- Xbench - Benchmarking tool The interface on OSX does take a while to get used to - and no matter what people say Finder is just not a patch on explorer. But other than that you'll find the environment great to work in It's a great platform for virutalisation. While in general I don't find OSX as snappy and quick as well setup Windows machine you will find that you get a far more consistent performance experience, which is personally more important to me. Oh, and a big thing for performance, swap the hard disk out for a 7200RPM unit - makes loads of difference. Well did for me anyway - I installed a 320Gb 7200RPM drive in my macbook and it's made it a lot snappier. cheers for the tres comprehensive list, I'll get downloading now! I'll also check the hard disk when I've saved up some more pennies! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyliss Posted November 14, 2008 Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 Welcome to the Mac family bazza!. Get yourself 'Missing Manual' by David Pogue, its and excellent bit of reference material. Its well explained and invaluable if transferring from windows. I finally stopped messing about and have purchased a Macbook Pro this afternoon - a few questions to the Apple guru's on here.... - which is better to run Windows - this bootcamp thing or VMWare? - any applications/downloads that are a must? - is there an easy resizer for batches of photo files? - is there msn messenger/skype for mac? My next mission is to move all my itunes and photos - am going to try my big external HDD so fingers crossed the mac can read it! ... I feel like a fish out of water! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rachel Posted November 14, 2008 Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 Definitely grab a VM engine to run Windows, be it Sun's VirtualBox (free) or the pay-for VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. If you just want to use some generic Windows apps and NOT install windows, go grab CodeWeavers CrossOver and install your Windows applications (via WINE) directly on your OS X system. Adium for all your (text based) chat needs - connects to pretty much everything. I agree with Mac re: Onyx (system maintenance) and Transmission (BT client) but also go check out XSlimmer. It removes all the unwanted languages from your applications AND for Universal binaries, rips out the code for the processor you don't have. I tried it last week and saved 2.5GB out of 4.2GB on this laptop. Things now load and run more quickly and have smaller system resource footprints too... The other "must haves: for multi-media: - VLC - Perian (multi-codec plugin for QuickTime - makes QT almost as good as VLC, but importantly runs in your browsers) - Flip4Mac WMV player - plays pretty much all the M$ proprietary media formats (another QuickTime addition) - Elgato's EyeTV for all your digital TV requirements - Handbrake for turning DVDs into MPEG 4 or other formats (like iPod/H.264, .AVIs...) to "backup" your movies to your HDD. - Fairmount (may not run with newer internal DVD drives - but does with externals) for mounting those pesky "other region coded" DVDs you have so you can play them, or transcode them with Handbrake. for file handling - go check out Zipeg (it handles pretty much all compression formats for things you download) RapidoSMTP to turn your laptop into its own SMTP (mail) server - very handy when travelling the globe iStumbler for the ol' Wifi sniffing (or the r309 trunk for KisMac if you are hardcore) Little Snitch for Outbound firewalling (those pesky "phone home" apps you might not want to let loose) Office stuff - OpenOffice v3.0 (free) or iWork (~$79 Aust.) if you don't want to cough up large sums for M$ Office. BTW - if you have VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop or Sun's VirtualBox VM engines, you can just run up a copy of Windows and Windows versions of Office. Likewise of you have a valid Office 2000, 2003 or (I think) 2007 install - just install it directly with CrossOver. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ritey Posted November 14, 2008 Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 Does the 309 version of KisMac work on the MacBook Pro's now? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rachel Posted November 16, 2008 Report Share Posted November 16, 2008 (edited) yep. I upgraded the 17" MBP from 10.4.11 (where you were stuck on trunk 239 - and it couldn't detect the airport card) to 10.5.5 and have happily run 305 and 309 on it now. iStumbler and other sniffers worked perfectly though on both Tiger and Leopard on this system. Also - Kismac works perfectly on the Mini (same hardware for wireless it seems). The black MacBook has a "new" Broadcom chipset and shipped with OS X 10.5.2 - so most of the wireless widgets like iStumbler (0.98 doesn't work, but 0.97 sort of does), AP Grapher and what have you wouldn't find the airport card, and hence wouldn't find any networks. Both Kismac 305 and 309 work perfectly on this machine (using the passive AP driver). Edited November 16, 2008 by Rachel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted November 16, 2008 Report Share Posted November 16, 2008 How could I have forgotten crossover - cracking piece of s/w :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazza_g Posted November 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 17, 2008 cheers Rachel and Dibbs - much appreciated, now got Windows bootcamped and running fine - next job is picking up VMWare Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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