Trying to convert from PC to mac and need advice.

[liquidgold]

i recently purchased a black macbook and i am really excited about making the switch. i generally used my pc for editing movies and tv shows from tivo as well as picture editing and some torrent downloading. i had planned to use bootcamp while i adjust, but here is where i need help:

-i have an external harddrive that i have been backing up a lot of files. is it best to use programs like macdrive and ntfs to continue to save windows/apple files to the harddrive?
-with the things i use windows for, do i need bootcamp, or would it be better to use parallels or a similar program?
-should i partition my external harddrive for time machine backups? and if so, how the heck do you do that?
-any other helpful hints on unlearning windows?
-anybody with programs that they use for video editing (nothing real complex) or downloading torrents?

thanks for the help everyone!

robbie

 

[fabian9]

hey there,

i made the switch about half a year ago and could not be any happier about it. lol

here are some answers to your questions:

- external HDDs. I had mine formatted in NTFS, which mac can read but not write to. So i formatted it to the apple format just to find out that windows cant read nor write on it! so the only option i saw was formatting it in FAT32 which both can read and write to. Only problem is that winXP doesn't support any files larger than 4GB on FAT32 apparently.

- i use winXP in parallel with leopard using VMWare fusion, it works really well. before that I used Parallels, which also allows you to boot into windows without being on leopard at the same time. but when leopard came along, parallels messed up so i switched to VMWare which works just as well. You don't even need to create a new partition to use it...

- time machine backups - no idea. I heard it doesn't work well with laptops? maybe somebody else can confirm...

- unlearning windows - just don't use it anymore so u get used to the mac environment. i think its a lot more intuitive than windows and things like expose and spaces is just great to improve your workflow.

hope that helps,

Fabian