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Buying an iMac in 2 weeks. I have some questions.

M

Mantronix

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 21, 2007
177
0
Louisiana
Hey everyone I've been a lurker/semi poster on this forum and I'm finally making the switch in less than 2 weeks. 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 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, phtotshop 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!
 
1. If I remember correctly, VMWare Fusion allows you to set the Windows XP image to expand with whatever disk space is being used in Windows. That way it would expand the size automatically to accommodate your needs.

2. According to this guy, he's able to partition his drive for Time Machine. I have never tried it myself though.

3. No idea.

4. Yes. You'll need a mini-DVI to DVI (or VGA) adapter though.

5. At the moment, the only way I know how to do this is to do a fresh install Leopard. You can click the "Customize" button during the installation and select what you want to be installed.

6. I do a little video editing on my MacBook. I'm almost 100% positive the iMac can handle it.
 
While setting up VMFusion, it will ask you the maximum amount of space you want to use for the Windows Virtual Machine. The program will then automatically adjust the size of the "partition" as you load programs into Windows. In other words, if you set it for 50GB max, it will start at at like 10 and grow as needed up to 50GB.

Hooking up a second monitor is very easy. Just purchase the mini-dvi to dvi connector (about 15 bucks) and you are good to go.

I wouldn't worry too much about freeing up disk space by not loading drivers and language packs. Leopard already uses very little space. The entire operating system is much more efficient than Windows so disk space won't be a problem. If you find you need more, you only need to hook up an external hard drive.

I do Hi-Def video editing on my iMac and it handles it very well. You won't have any problems.

Enjoy your iMac!
 
Mantronix said:
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?
Click to expand...

Congrats on your future iMac!!!! I got mine a few months ago and love it.

I haven't activated TimeMachine yet but I do know 50GB is not enough space for time machine. Your first backup could use all of that so you wouldn't have any room for future backups. IMHO, your TM drive should at least equal your internal hard drive.

I bought a RAID 1 enclosure and put 2 750GB drives in it and made 500GB for TM (that's how big my internal drive is) and the rest for my FCE scratch drive.
 
2. The drive Time Machine resides on should be as big or bigger than all you drives backed up on to it, or the backup might not fit.

Why put data and backup on the same physical drive.

If that drive fails you lose your back-up AND data.


Here is what I did, and I am very comfortable in the setup as far as data safety.


320 Gig HDD - Internal iMac Drive
500 Gig HDD - External Data Drive - iTunes and iPhoto files live here
750 Gig HDD - External Time Machine Drive - Holds backup of the 320 and 500.

Current Usage on my system .....

#1 320 Gig ----> 81.82 GB Used ( moving iTunes and iPhoto saved a ton of space )

#2 500 Gig Ext ---> 206.08 GB Used (iTunes & iPhoto only )

#3 750 Gig Ext ---> 346.85 GB Used ( Time Machine Drive )


Anyone one of those drives fail, and I am in great shape.

The only way I could get hurt is if 2 drives fail and one of those two is Time Machine. ( I might get a 4th drive as a backup to Time Machine and do weekly backups on it - but that's really overkill )


I know the amount used on Time Machine is greater than the other two drives combined but there are some older backups on there from before I adopted the three drive setup.
 
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?

Why not use apple's bootcamp and boot into windows from startup,it will be faster.

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?

I would get a disk as big as the internal one or bigger,hard disks are cheap nowadays.

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.

Don't know,rare that I play games

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?

Easy,just get an adaptorand You can mirror or extent your desktop.
Running the game AND other software makes it slower but then again,You as a human can not do things at one time so if the game is paused it would be 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.

Ok,here we go
You could reinstall the OS when You get your new Mac and deselect the printer drivers You don't want,after You installed it,You startup and you are in Your system you can use several programs to remove those languages(Monolingual-Xslimmer-LanguageStripper-Jetstream-and more),
Xslimmer also lets You remove unneeded code(most programs are universal,this means it runs on intel as well on ppc)this also removes a lot!
nother tip for faster startup,go into your system folder/library/extensions and remove the graphic drivers called Gforce,You need an administrator account for this but you are the owner and it has that privilige but still need your password for it when you drag them to the trash,there's another graphic driver for macbook and this one can also be deleted.
Also,the non Ati Radeon drivers You can remove!
You don't have to but it makes startup faster.

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.

Sure
 
mavherzog said:
Save yourself some money and pick up the ram from newegg instead.
Click to expand...
4 gigs of ram for roughly $100.00 from OWC? You can't get any cheaper than that. If so show me the link.

EDIT: NM I found some from there. $10-15 cheaper per stick. Thanks I'm going for the Corsairs which is the same price but I've used them in the past.
 
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