I’m (still, apparently infinitely) in the market for a new laptop. Up until now I’ve been a PC user, but I’m considering taking the plunge to a MacBook. My two main issues are cost (ye gods they’re pricey) and getting used to Leopard (which, IMO, is preferable to Vista).
I’ve got a 250gb external hard drive, which is using FAT32. Standard USB connection, loaded with backup stuff, plus a considerable quantity of movies (.avi mostly) and music. If I were to buy a Mac, would I be able to just plug my drive in and go? I’m under the impression that there are no inherent problems with the file system or anything, but I’ve also seen some (unverified) rumors* that using an unpartitioned FAT32 drive between Mac and Windows systems can result in data loss/corruption.
*I’m already pretty sure that it would work, but as buying a Mac involves dropping an insane amount of money (for my student budget), I want to be 100% sure as I weigh the decision.
Macs have absolutely no problem reading FAT32. They’ll also write FAT32.
Macs can also read NTFS, the Windows NT filesystem. Writing NTFS is not officially supported, as far as I know. But I had no problem reading my NTFS drive out of my dead PC.
You can just plug them in via USB. OS X recognises them and away you go.
On my Mac, I created a FAT32 partition to install Windows on using BootCamp. The rest of the drive is Apple’s own HSF+ filesystem, where OS X resides. I don’t think you can run OS X out of a FAT32 partition, though.
So, running OS X off my unpartitioned FAT32 drive = no go. Transferring music from a Windows machine onto a Mac via my unpartitioned FAT32 drive = A-OK. That’s what I thought, and thank you for confirming it.
(Now to convince myself and my father (who’s splitting the cost with me) that it’s worth the extra cost for a Mac…)
You can access Windows shares quite nicely from Mac. I have a Linux box running Samba that serves up MP3s as Windows shares and I put files on it from any handy machine in the house, Windows or Mac.
In addition, I often attach to Windows machines from my MacBook Pro over my LAN in order to grab a movie off of the PC’s hard drive.
One small note about non-native file systems with the Mac: OS X has lots of metadata about files that comes from the older Mac OS roots. Since there is no neat place to put this metadata in a non-Mac filesystem, you end up with lots of strange little files that look like Unix hidden files (i.e. with a leading dot like this: “.somefile”). Just ignore them and don’t mess with them and they won’t bother you.
The Mac is the most flexible mass-market computer I know of.
It runs its own OS X 10.5 operating system with the easy-to-use GUI.
It runs Windows and OS X side by side, either booting from one to the other or running Windows inside a virtual machine on OS X. This means that if you have one Windows program you need to run, you can install your copy of Windows on your Mac, and set up your Windows program to start so that you never even see Windows itself running, just your program. You need a third-party program such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion to do the virtual machine thing, though.
Mac OS X version 10.5 (now shipping on new machines) is Unix out of the box (UNIX 03 certified by the Open Group), so if you’re doing classic CS stuff, you’ve got an old-school Unix prompt waiting for you inside the Terminal program. All the classic Unix commands are there, and you can install MacPorts to give you command-line access to many more open-source Unix/Linux programs.
The Mac also runs X11 programs such as The Gimp and Inkscape, freeware painting (raster) and drawing (vector) programs comparable to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
The “leave them be and they’ll be fine” approach is my general attitude towards cryptically-named files I did not myself create. I know enough about computers to know that if I don’t have a reason to mess with it, only bad will come from messing with it.
The flexibility is mostly why I want one (plus they’re so very pretty inside and out). However, even with a student discount I’m looking at paying over $1,000 for one (assuming I get 2gb of ram plus a protection plan, which my father insists upon). I could easily save a couple hundred bucks and get a decent Windows machine, but Vista does not give me the warm fuzzies that OS X does. (And at this point, a desktop would be ridiculously impractical for me, which rules out the Mini.)
Check out battery life too. The latest version of the base MacBook Pro (15-inch screen) has about a 6.5-hour battery life. They went to an LED-based backlight about a month after I bought mine, which only has a 3.5-hour battery life.
You can write to as well as read from NTFS disks by installing the MacFUSE userspace filesystem extension and the NTFS-3G module thereof. Freeware. Google it.
Cool! I downloaded and installed MacFUSE, and then the MacFusion to integrate it into the Finder, and now my FTP server account shows up as a network drive.
Unfortunately, the NTFS-3G filesystem does not seem to work with my external NTFS drive. This may be because of corruption on the NTFS drive, which the Mac will not then let me use; I’ll shut off MacFuse and see whether I get read access. (I was before.)
Update: I removed the ntfs-3g.fs module from the /System/Library/Filesystems directory, and now Finder can see the external NTFS drive again. Clearly some tuning is in order. I think I’ll remove MacFuse, or at least keep it from autostarting, when I get VMWare Fusion and put XP on the other partition as well. What better way to get to NTFS than through Windows?
Okay, while I’ve got people who know something about macs here, I’m going to throw another question out, this one about BootCamp. I think I may have asked before but I still haven’t gotten a solid consensus.
I have a “resinstallation CD” of XP that shipped with my Dell laptop. It has SP1 on it. It’s not the retail version of XP. Using BootCamp, would I be able to install XP from that disc onto a Mac? Internet research has said “definitely yes”, “maybe” and “no way”.
I guess if you can answer the question “Can I use my reinstallation CD for the Dell to install XP on a HP?” then the answer would be the same.
My money is on it not being possible without a ton of effort. You are doing a clean OS install on a fresh machine that is not a Dell, so you need an original XP install CD. Especially if that CD is one of those system restore CDs that restore a Ghost image of a full build, complete with Dell ads and other assorted crapware (use the PC Decrapifier for those BTW).
One other possibility here is to transfer data using a Mac-formatted drive and MacDrive (software for your PC). It’s commercial software, but there’s a free trial available. This is one way to avoid the filesize limitations of FAT32 and the read-only limitation of NTFS on the Mac.
Full disclosure: I work for the software company that develops MacDrive.
A BootCamp installation of Windows XP requires Service Pack 2 or above. Apple states in their Boot Camp instructions that you cannot install an earlier version of XP and upgrade it to SP2.
