mac help

Well I downloaded openoffice aqua last night. I chose it over neo as the software is supposed to be built in native code which should help it run faster, not that I tried neo to compare but I read somewhere that neo was being held back by running with java and what do you know I think OO aqua is with java too. Is it a good thing is it a bad thing I don't even know what java is. Maybe if I knew I would have went with neo they seem dedicated to mac.

Anyway I downloaded OO aqua now so I will play with it and see how it goes. There is always the trash bin then neo then ms office.

I must say that it takes 8 seconds from clicking the icon in the dashboard to be ready for input on a new spreadsheet. Not that I care, I will wait and see how it will work and talk with my work. Menu bar doesn't sport the beautiful mac look, it looks just like ms office from early era in a mac kinda way which is no bad thing cos if you use pc at work with excel then it keeps the interface looking the same with all the familiar buttons.

Just one more thing after the download I dragged the OO app to my apps then I was left with an icon on the desktop that looked like a drive to which I pressed eject - did I do it right?

Yes. You have experienced your first .DMG

This is a file that 'mounts' a pretend drive on your desktop, you take the contents out either via an installer or drag then you drag it to the trash where the pretend drive is 'ejected'

Having used macs as my main computer forever I find these open projects just look like shit, adn sadly I cannot get beyond that to what is probably a very good product. I know its shallow.

That being said I also know that open projects can be breath takingly good, such as XBMC and PLEX

Thanks that's reassuring.

I thought s**t its most probably gone to some part of the hard drive I will never find.

I think I will go out today and get Leopard OSX the missing manual as recommended on another thread.

After development and prototype detailed specification sheets for necessary adjustments and tweaks are sent in excel format from my customers which include photos with lines, arrows, etc that point to specific points. I then use excel to open, manipulate and create a further spec sheet for production based on the first which saves tremendous time as my time is needed on the production floor. This normally means that I run out of time and have to take work home.

At home I have an imac so I needed software to help me do my excel homework. I wanted to start with the free apps and downloaded OO aqua which has been working pretty slickly and don't look bad actually although when you highlight a row it is way too light. It opens all my spec sheets no problem with all the info in tact and saves them after modification in .xls.

I have been feeling pretty smug until today when I opened a spec sheet that I created from scratch. It is all number data on 3 seperate pages, the first page includes a formula in 3 of the columns. When it was opened with excel at work that first page opened with 4 decimal points so that a number 5 for example became 5.0000. Not a big deal so I reformatted but nonetheless not like for like.

Mustn't grumble about something free as when I had numbers on free trial it let me open my file at work but I could not format text and numbers with the italics or bold. And who knows what else as I am a VERY basic user.

I will carry on with OO and see what neo brings out end of this month.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
download things try them out, don't worry its a mac. If you don't like it drag it to the trash and empty it.

Keep following this advice and in a short while you will have a very good chance of damaged directories and bits of crap residing in application data, libraries and preference folders.

Yes, Macs are pretty robust but regularly dragging downloaded applications to trash is not best practice for keeping a Mac in good, reliable running order.

Bad habits will bite you back eventually.

If you really must try lots of 3rd party applications, load them onto a cloned drive rather than your main computer. That way, if anything goes wrong, your main computer drive is unaffected.

Regards

Ian

quote:

Originally posted by ianmacd:

Bad habits will bite you back eventually.

If you really must try lots of 3rd party applications, load them onto a cloned drive rather than your main computer. That way, if anything goes wrong, your main computer drive is unaffected.

Regards

Ian

Easy to say but how do you do that, bearing in mind these sort of errors are more likely made by novices and as such, do not know of these "cloned drives" of which you speak.

quote:

Originally posted by BigH47:

Easy to say but how do you do that, bearing in mind these sort of errors are more likely made by novices and as such, do not know of these "cloned drives" of which you speak.

You are right, for novices and people new to Macs, a second cloned drive may seem a little too much to cope with although they are actually incredibly easy to set up.

But taking the first part of my post, loading software, trying it out and then dragging the application to the Trash is a sure way of your Mac becoming less reliable in the future. And presumably reliability would be why someone would buy a Mac in the first place, along with great design.

Regarding cloning, SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are two excellent applications for cloning and all you need is a second internal or external hard drive. The whole process takes 10 minutes.

Best regards

Ian

Ian give us specifics. You just sound like an x PC guy.

Worse case scenario. Some stuff gets left in a relative folder in users>library>application support and users>library>preferences.

The only application thet ever did anything bad to me was Norton, but then every one knows thats crap.

If you know what you are on about fair enough. But your post sounds like a PC guy who thinks he knows what he is on about.

Looking through info on how to uninstall programs on a mac its as garyi says above. Just got to be careful on what you delete from the application support and preferences folders. Nice and simple.

From there on it depends on how responsible a user is. Common sense that downloading many and all types of different applications at some point you will run into trouble.
Again common sense should tell you to research anything that takes your fancy before you install it for stability and compatibility issues with your machine.

I have a simple rule. Download from apples site, macupdate or versiontracker.

Can't really go wrong then.

How should you manage say Music collector and Firefox then?

Finally about to buy an external HD to use with the time machine facility. Stupid not to have one yet but moving abroad has forced the issue.

Any thoughts as to why not to use the tiny usb powered portable HD's (no need for a power brick)?

Whether desktop or portable would the imac take control of turning it on and off?

Many thanks

Zorba,

If you want easy compatibility with Time Machine just go for the Apple Time Capsule, "it just works" as you said in an earlier post. Also if it does not, those nice people at Apple will help you, as they did me recently.

I've now got 2 G5's and a Macbook G4 at home that back up automatically to the Time Capsule (1TB). The only thing does not is not is a work PC that I back up to a separate external hard drive.

Regards

Nic

cheers Nic,

that would be the perfect match but due to the move and potential new house build I was looking at solutions up to the £70 mark, the only luxury I will be squeezing past the other half is my little bit of British that I will be taking and thats a Naim Nait that I have been 3 years patiently waiting for and so soon to buy. The difference saved not buying the time capsule will be a Nait XS over the Nait 5i.

Regards
zorba

Zorba,

No worries, I like your thinking. Music first.

I suggested the Time Capsule, because for me it requires no thought once set up. I have never been very good at backing up the PC manually, only when it is usually too late!

Sorry I have no personal recommendations for hard drives, but they seem to be dropping in price all the time.

Regards

Nic

Prices have come down and there are a few good deals out there, I have my eyes on a few.

Before I purchase I was hoping to see if there were any views on having a portable hard drive connected by usb continuously to the mac's time machine or whether I should stick to a "desktop" classed hd and make do with the extra power cable.

thanks
zorba

You will get away with us powered but they can be flaky, for the sake of fifty odd quid I would get a proper powered harddrive.

Yeah, I suppose however small the footprint of a portable hd its still there on the desk and a wire (I would prefer wired connections) so why not the next size up with a slightly bigger footprint, which may supply a longer wire to hide the drive under the desk and also have a proper power supply with on/off switch and avoid being continuously on and off as the imac wakes and sleeps just in case it taxes the mac on every start up.

£55 for a 500gb tosh desktop hd delivered was good value to me. The overall feedbacks seemed better than other makes so I hope it proves a good (RELIABLE) buy. They say it will work with mac but mac users are best to format with mac os extended journaled and get it running with Time Machine.

I have been on the apple site forums and seen people experiencing problems with TC especially after important updates such as 10.5.7 and it has me thinking that I will be away quite often leaving the Mrs and children abroad alone with with mac (which is why the back up issue has been forced) and they may come up against such an issue which can cause shutdown and hanging.

Would it be wise to do manual weekly back ups and not use TC?

TC is set to back up every hour. Can it be set to daily or weekly?

thanks
zorba

Sorry, just found out why its best to let TC do its thing every hour. I copied and pasted this from apple site;

Additional Information
Depending on how large your data is and how large your backup is, and how fast the connection is to your backup disk, this "Preparing" process may take significantly more time.


How can Time Machine "lose track" of changed files and folders?

Time Machine may lose track of files and folders that have changed if your Mac is not shut down properly, or if a mounted disk is not removed properly by ejecting it first.

This may also happen if you just installed a software update, or if you use your computer for several days without performing a Time Machine backup (by not having the disk connected, for example).

It also says not to interupt while in the"preparing" process but won't it get in the way if it prepares every hour and you need the mac's resources elsewhere?

Sorry everyone I don't normally get enough time off work to investigate (reason for big move - 20 years of it) but nearly all my questions have been answered foraging in the apple forum.

Just like Nic, Time Capsule would be the way to go as a fit and forget avoiding most problems as it is made for the purpose and is continuously on.

Otherwise for people like me using a hard drive of their choice;

1. correct setup is crucial (as always)

2. initial back up will take most time, however long it takes give it time to do so

3. after major updates again it will take a long time to back up 'deep traversal' give it the time it needs.

4. make sure if your chosen hard drive has sleep function or energy saver mode that it is turned off otherwise TM will be forever stuck in 'prepare' mode and will cause the 'hangs' that people are complaining of - Time Capsule is always on.

5. if you use a portable drive make sure you eject it properly and not just pull the cable as it will most definitely cause problems especially during a back up.

6. also if wireless sometimes bandwidth can be restrictive and make back ups slower especially if downloading at same time.

No doubt there are loads more but I am not at the level to give advice. I will be receiving my hd soon, I hope I get it right and see how it works over the next 2 weeks before I move.

report soon - apologies for the bore.

I have had very few issues with timemachine. I just stuck a 500 gig harddrive on a hub onto my airport extreme (has a printer and drobo on there too) and off it goes has been rock solid for over a year.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
I have had very few issues with timemachine.

Do very few issues mean some real issues for the inexperienced?

Just received the tosh drive. I hope I get it right with the formatting side of things.

My imac is a 250gb version would you recommend using the full 500gb of the tosh drive for time machine or should I partition 300gb for TM and leave 200gb for future storage?

thanks

Must admit that I ended up ditching an entire years worth of time machine back-up file for my main machine because it seemed to get corrupted and would not mount. Rather optimistically, I'd pointed four machines at the same 1 tb drive connected to Airport Extreme for back-up.

I've now got my main machine doing its time machine back-ups to a directly connected (on USB) 1 tb drive of its own. Must say that time machine is far more usable this way too.

Thankfully, the 'lost' back-up was of no importance. Time machine is very good but not idiot proof either.

The only issues I have experienced is that when entering time machine over a network its a bit of a dog.

That's good.

I have decided to set up the whole drive for time machine purposes only that way it works and serves only one purpose which I hope should help keep any problems to a minimum.