Newbie has no clue what he is doing!!

[adyork]

I recently purchased a used MBA with the 80 gig hdd and 2G ram. I'm new to the Mac game, and my previous computer was a HP 770c. So yeah I was a little behind the times. I have about 40 gigs of music and movies on my old tower, which now has a shot motherboard. What would be the best way for me to move this data to my Air? Also, I was planning on purchasing a a Time Capsule to get wireless in my house. I would like to be able to use the TC to get my XBOX online as well as to be able to take full advantage of the NXE with Netflix. Any help anybody can offer on any of these topics would be extremely helpful. I apologize if this is not the appropriate forum for these topics, I just didnt know where to start.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

 

[keantan]

Since your motherboard is shot, the easiest thing to do is to get an external hard disk enclosure, take your disk drive out your pc and copy everything via USB to your new air.

Time capsule works well for me, it works great with my air.

For your Xbox, is this the original xbox? if so then as long as you use an ethernet connection to connect your xbox to your Time capsule it should be fine.

For Xbox360, you should be able to do it as above or use the wireless adapter that is sold seperately. Although if you take teh wireless method, it will slow the overall wireless speed down as it only runs on 802.11g not n.

Don't know about netflix. Don't use it. Not from US. Don't see why it shouldn't work though.

 

[adyork]

Thanks for the help Keantan. That's what I figured I would do, I just wasn't sure if I would encounter any problems with the PC hardrive going to my MBA. But that is awesome that a simple enclosure set up will work. I do have an XBOX360, and I think you are right, it will prolly just be easier to hard wire the TC to the 360. Thanks again for all your help.

 

[keantan]

Thanks for the help Keantan. That's what I figured I would do, I just wasn't sure if I would encounter any problems with the PC hardrive going to my MBA. But that is awesome that a simple enclosure set up will work. I do have an XBOX360, and I think you are right, it will prolly just be easier to hard wire the TC to the 360. Thanks again for all your help.

No problem, If your hard disk is formatted as an NTFS drive you can only read from it. If it's FAT32, then you can read/write to it also. The easiest way is hardwire, faster than wireless too.

 

[adyork]

I'm assuming that the hard drive you mentioned that should be set to FAT32is the hard drive that I am trying to pull files from. Since the hard drive in question is not in a functioning tower, how can I check to make sure that it is set FAT 32 and not to NTFS.

I apologize for all of the questions, I just want to make sure that I don't screw this up out of my own ignorance.

I was also wondering, if I can get my music/movies off my old hard drive, which I am pretty sure is IDE, and then load that onto my MBA, shouldnt I be able to erase my old 120G IDE drive and use it like an external and store stuff on it?
I ask this because I bought my MBA used from a Korean guy, and I had to do a password reset to get the menus in English. I still only have administrator permissions and not owner permissions, so alot of the software on the MBA can't be upgraded under my account. (When I attempt to upgrade any third party software, I can get the disk image, but when I go to load it into the Applications folder, I get an error message regarding "insufficient privileges". Normally, I would just do an erase and install of Leopard and go on with life, but this MBA was loaded.
It has Parallels, Adobe CS3 (everything), Toast 9 Titanium, Office for Mac, and I'm sure I am forgetting something else too. So I would like to not lose these programs, but really need to get owner permissions. I know this is a lot, but do you have any ideas, or maybe point me in the right direction?

 

[silentio]

Once you plug in your old IDE drive using a USB case, you should be able to right click (or cmd+click, if not using an external mouse) on it and see info.

If you want, you can use spotlight (magnifying glass on top right corner of your screen), search for Disk Utility to work on the external drive. Be careful there though, as you don't want to go poking around there and accidentally delete a partition you need.

About the applications, unless the guy who sold it to you meant to give you those apps, i'm pretty sure the licenses belong to him. I'm not too familiar with owner permissions, so can't comment there.