iMac OS X and a MS convert (maybe)

[Lynn1130]

On the other hand i have had nothing but frustration with iPhones iPads and Mac. My daughter gave me her MacBook and I quickly put Bootcamp on it ant went to Window 7. I still have my iphone. it it won't ring at my house and goes directly to voice mail. The personal hotspot is intermittent and drops out. Windows has it's problems but Apple stuff is just annoying

 

[porthole]

So, I got my iMac. Man - a 27" monitor is huge!

Still just beginning to play around. Some things are nice some will prove to be frustrating, that I can see already.

Did the Boot Camp and Parallels things using Win 7 Pro.

I read in several places that Boot Camp wasn't really needed. But I am glad I went that route for now. Quicken 2014 is way faster on the boot partition then running under Parallels.

I managed to lock out my speakers already, and Google is your friend. Settings such as that can be reset by using some fancy key strokes and resetting the NV RAM

I picked up a Belkin BT number keypad - so far it doesn't run under Win 7 under Parallels.

I really like using my Outlook and getting it work on the Mac is not as smooth as I 'd hoped. Although that may have something to do with me using Outlook 2003

So far though I am a bit dismayed with the video I was hoping to accomplish. I my mind I somewhat helped justify the purchase thinking I would finally be able to do something with almost 200 hours of video to transfer.

I signed up for Apple's "One to One" for the year, figured even an old dog can learn new tricks.

Glad I did. My first "One to One" session today was with Aperture. I had not even opened the program yet, and I'm glad I didn't. My method of storing my many thousands of digital phots is so archaic compared to what is available under the iMac.

My second was a group session (up to four) on the basic Mac stuff. No one else showed up, so I had a second "one to One"

 

[porthole]

Video woes

Both Final Cut Pro and the latest Mac software and hardware state compatibility with my Sony TRV-310 Handy Cam. In anticipation of getting the iMac I strated copying old VHS stuff to the camera to get it in a digital format.

Apple does not have the proper cabling for the camera to talk to the computer.
Radio Shack - one Sony iLink (fire wire) 4 pin to 9 pin Firewire (FW 800) cable and an Apple FW 800 to Thunderbolt get me the interface.

Under Final Cut and the camera playing a tape I can see and hear the output on the FCP X import window - BUT IT DOES NOT SAVE IT!!!!!!
Tried multiple times, no luck, even tried under iMovie and still no luck.

Goggling I found out that apparently the Mac OS can not record video from many cameras. More on the Obi Wan Google and I found that an old version of iMovie 6 HD may work. There are people on the net who know this and keep valid copies of iMovie 6 on their servers.

iMovie 6 both allows the video in and saves it. But, it doe not save it to a compatible format that FCP X or iMovie can read Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Tried burning to a DVD, that ought to work. It does, but iMovie 6 burns the DVD in a format that FCP cannot import. Does play well on my PC though.

 

[SeattleLion]

I am a Microsoft fan and have worked there as well. In a recent position at a university, all PC's were iMac's. Macs use the same chips as other PC's nowadays. I used bootcamp and booted straight to Windows. There was never a problem and I never even bothered with the Mac OS side of things. I strongly recommend Win 8.1. You can have it boot directly to the desktop that looks just like Win 7 (go to the desktop, right click on the task bar, click "Properties", click the navigation tab and you will see a check box that says "When I sign in or close all apps on a screen, go to the desktop instead of Start. Also click "Sho Start on the display I'm using when I press the Windows logo key". Way easier to do than write.

If you don't use Mac programs, allocate as much disk as you can to Windows. Win 8.1 boots very fast and never gave me a second of grief on my iMac.

One quick tip, use a cloud backup service. I use Crashplan. It's cheap and guarantees you never have to worry about your files.

 

[porthole]

One quick tip, use a cloud backup service. I use CrashPlan. It's cheap and guarantees you never have to worry about your files.

Using Time Machine with a 4TB Thunderbolt drive and signed up for CrashPlan.

I see the benefit of CrashPlan, but after a 5-10 days to back up to the cloud I don't think I would use if for anything more then to find an errant file or two.


As to the Mac world - old dog - new tricks - this is quite the curve...........

 

[recumbent615]

Using Time Machine with a 4TB Thunderbolt drive and signed up for CrashPlan.

I see the benefit of CrashPlan, but after a 5-10 days to back up to the cloud I don't think I would use if for anything more then to find an errant file or two.


As to the Mac world - old dog - new tricks - this is quite the curve...........

Duane,

I also use Time Machine and it is great for turning back the clock and recovering files that were deleted etc. The real issue here is if there was a disaster and all of your computer gear was lost or destroyed. having all of your data files in the cloud, protects you from data loss in this case. I used to only do backups locally but becuase I know that disks fail I was somewhat anal and would back up all of my data to several raid protected arrays on multiple systems in my house. that was until a friend of mine had a fire in his house and like me did not have an off site backup. he lost all of his data, all of his photos ( digital and physical ) and all of the historical documents that he had collected on his family over the years. it was after that event that I decided to start making a backup in the cloud... and after several attempts and relative failures with some vendors I found crashplan.

with over 8TB of unique data the seeding of my backup to over a month over my Internet connection and a restore would take about 1/3 as long over the internet since my connection is 25/75. But Crash plan can dump your date to disk and ship it to you over night in case of a 100% data lost ... such as my friend had with his fire.

in the end he did recover some of his data - by sending all of the disk drives to a recovery company - and paying well of 5K to recover less than 20% of his photos.

Like insurance - I hope I never need it but it is nice to know it's there.

 

[porthole]

CrashPlan, relatively speaking, is inexpensive. Just takes forever and backing up both Mac and Windows partition adds to the challenge.
Want to really add to the challenge? Dump your music collection into the mix before your first backup is done.

 

[recumbent615]

Every time you change the backup set ( the list of directories to be backed up ) it will rescan the entire set of files to be backed up - bring all actual backups to a standstill.

I use it to backup my windows, ( I run it under the virtual machine ) and my MAC and Linux systems. on the mac I backup both the MAC and the windows partitions, on the Virtual Machine running windows I only backup the local machine files not the stuff that is written to my home directory, because that is backed up my the Mac already. I keep my Quick book files on the local Virtual disk to keep it as fast as possible.

Kevin

 

[SeattleLion]

I use Crash Plan. I can go back as far as I want. Not to mention that everything is always backed up. I keep 100% of my files on skydrive (OneDrive now), but my pictures are all in DropBox. Skydrive compresses pictures. DropBox doesn't. You can inexpensively buy extra storage on both.

 

[porthole]

So after two months of use, I am not as impressed as I thought I would be. Steep curve for long time DOS and Win X users.

That, and after using Outlook for as long as it has been out, there really is nothing that compares to it.
As well as the ease of use of excel and word.

No real Quicken either.

Some short comings with the native mail OS and spell check is really weak.

Storing tens of thousands of pictures is a whole new way of thinking as well.

 

[recumbent615]

Duane,

I have to agree that the basic Business Software is lacking, But MS Office for OS X is very usable ( albeit a generation behind )

As many have described earlier - some applications are just not available or are so hobbled that you still need to have a virtual version of Windows around to be complete.

For photos, I gave up trying to manage them long ago when I hit 10K images, I used a few freeware photo work flow applications but they left me with data stored outside the image and did not properly update the meta data; I finally switched to Adobe light room when it came out and have maintained my photos in that application, it allows me to directly attache the details to the full extent that the Meta Data standard allows. It also allows me to group and tag images so I can easily sort and find them when needed now that I'm well over 50K images. it also has some great WF management and basic image processing built in, often I don't even need to use photo shop as most of the basic adjustments are now in LR.

Kevin

 

[scottyb]

I too was a long time DOS and Win user. I'm really not seeing the problems you are having, other than the disappointment with Quicken. I use Outlook at work and Mail at home. I have both business and personal emails on both. My calendars are all linked as well as my contacts. I freely move files back and forth from Word and Excel to Numbers and Pages. Both are sync'd with my android phone. I also use remote desktop from PC to Mac and back. To be honest, even QMac has been more than adequate, just not as pretty. I still save all my photos in a folder, categorized the way I want and I only import them to iPhoto or iMovie when I want to manipulate them. The upside is, after 4 years, the Mac has locked up less than my new at work Dell XPS Win 7 PC did in the 1st 3 mo. I will buy another Mac when the time comes, but the way it is running now, it may be a while.