New iMac

[gean]

Hi to all, I going to purchase a new iMac, maybe a portable, not 100% sure at this time but 95% sure it will be the imac. I going to wait till the new version of software come out in Oct. I currently use a windows machine, (7508gx gaateway notebook*) and am getting fed up. Note my son has been using mac for about 8 years; he loves it. Well anyway a few question if you don't mind. First i have an canon ip4200 printer, a canon lide 30 scanner, and an hp cd/dvd writer with lightscribe, which is usb, and last a 200gig external (maxter) hard drive. My question will they just plug in and work? The one i really concerned about is the printer, because i can print to cd with it, and I dont' want to loose that feature.

TH HP cd/dvd writer is a 740.

Another thing i do like about the gateway is the card slot that are built in. Does Apple have this? if it does i can't find any info about it. I currently use a canon 620 camera, and an hp ipaq 2215, which will sync with the gateway. Will it work with the imac? not sure about this.

Suggestion my son told me get at least 2 gig or ram. Of which i will do.

* the usb ports arn't all 2.0 and it keep going in an out.

The imac i lookin at is the 20inch 2.4 gig machine; of which i have seen in Milwaukee Wi. I not sure if i can spring for the 24 in one. .

Last thing any suggestion, or any comments apprecitated,

Sorry post is so long.

gean

 

[dammitjanet@gma]

Your printer is compatible
Canon UK iP4200 specs

Your scanner Canon Lide 30 is also mac compliant
Canon UK LIDE 30 specs

I have a Maxtor 320Gb drive with both Firewire and USB ports on it, both work fine with all my Macs. You may need to reformat it though to work correctly with a mac, or format it as FAT32 as long as you dont need very large files on there like DVD rips.

As to your HP cd/dvd writer with lightscribe, without a model number its a little difficult to say 100% compatible but as long as it is usb then it will be more than likely to be supported. You will need to d/l the mac software for support for lightscribe HERE if you use lightscribe rather than print color labels.

 

[theBB]

I wouldn't worry too much about the DVD writer. It will most probably work to read discs, but writing to them is unlikely unless HP offers special Mac drivers or you can get an app like Patchburn, which might make it Mac compatible.

I don't know your budget, but 1GB RAM is probably good enough for even movie editing. You may not notice the difference between 1 and 2. It is mostly a geeky feel good thing, a placebo effect that makes users feel like they have a faster machine. You can buy it as is and see if you want more. It is usually cheaper to buy from third part sellers, anyways...

Is Maxtor formatted as NTFS or FAT32? If it is the former, you can read your files and copy them to your Mac hard disk. If it is the latter you can even write to it. However, FAT32 has a maximum of 4GB file size limitation (both for Windows and Mac.) If you don't have any files larger than 4GB, no problem, but some video files could get larger than that. You'll probably want to buy a bigger external disk for Time Machine (will be part of the new version of Mac OSX in October) so that you can backup all of your files, instead of just a subset. The prices for hard disks keep going down anyways.

 

[l33r0y]

If the rumors are correct, Leopard will be able to read & write to NTFS - so you won't need to reformat it.

If you find any compatability issues with the lightscribe drive, or any other hardware (most is plug and play on the Mac) - you always have the fallback option of using bootcamp, or running a virtual XP/Vista machine using Parallels or VMware.

Happy days!