PDA

View Full Version : Leopard and many a question....



Wuzzle
7th-November-2007, 08:58 AM
Well am sitting waiting twiddling my thumbs for my shiny mac to arrive.

I am thinking of dual booting it or even going one futher and putting linux in it. :innocent: I here there is bootcamp and Parallels for this anyone got any experience in them?

Also while am waiting for my mac i have to decide how much memory i want. Its coming with 1gb however i was thinking of buying more and upgrading it.

Just not sure how much is enough to keep it happy. I can get 2gb or even 4gb. I hear parallels can be a bit resource hungry. Would 2gb be enough or should i shell out for 4gb?

Also would be interested to know what people think of timemachine? Do i need to buy like an external drive for that to work? :confused:

I'd like to hav eth ablity to dive into windows if and when I need to. Linux is just for work purposes. Course they will all go once am fully drowned in Leopard and feel comfortible to mircocrud xp/vista

Also whats better Iworks or office2004/8? :confused:

Thank you kindly

Wuzzle..... one mail short of a macbook :whistle:

P.s am sure there will be more questions but seeing how am at the start of the mac road i though the ceroc geek corner would be a good place to start with my quest....ions :)

straycat
7th-November-2007, 10:04 AM
Well am sitting waiting twiddling my thumbs for my shiny mac to arrive.

I am thinking of dual booting it or even going one futher and putting linux in it. :innocent: I here there is bootcamp and Parallels for this anyone got any experience in them?
Not myself, but I have a friend who makes use of 'em, and I can probably answer some questions on it.



Also while am waiting for my mac i have to decide how much memory i want. Its coming with 1gb however i was thinking of buying more and upgrading it. Just not sure how much is enough to keep it happy.

Like any machine, as much as you can reasonably afford. I have 2.5Gb in my own machine 9 (dual G5 with Leopard). You definitely want at least 2Gb. If it's not too much of a stretch, and you're thinking about running parallels, going to 3 or 4 is definitely worth looking at.



Also would be interested to know what people think of timemachine? Do i need to buy like an external drive for that to work? :confused:

I'm very impressed with Time Machine, although I have yet to use it 'in anger'. Yes, you need an external drive (or a second internal one) - but these are pretty cheap these days - I just got me a 500Gb Lacie USB2 for £85, and it's doing the job very nicely. Given the woes of data loss, it's well worth the investment.



Also whats better Iworks or office2004/8? :confused:

That depends what you want them for. If your needs are fairly simple - letter writing, making the odd poster, simple spreadsheets & presentation etc etc, iWork could be the way to go. It's a superb product. Pages is no Word in terms of features (I look at it as a kind of lightweight Word/Publisher blend), but what it does, it does wonderfully. Keynote is reputed to be a very good alternative to Powerpoint. Numbers is a great little spreadsheet program which embraces an extremely unusual ethic - that spreadsheets should be easy to use, and can actually look great. It's not nearly as powerful as Excell though, so if you need a heavyweight full-featured spreadsheet, Office may well be the one. No database app, but then Mac Office doesn't have Access anyway. if you need a database, go for Filemaker.

For me, iWork does everything I need - no need to touch Office.

Oh - last thought - if you need a lot of compatibility with Office users, you might want Office. iWork can read / write Office compatible documents, but as with any 'compatible' competing products, it's not perfect in that regard.

Wuzzle
7th-November-2007, 11:10 AM
Cheers for the info about parallel. I can easily get 2gb cause it costs £35 quid. Unlike the £85 it would of cost from the apple online store :really:

4gb only costs £115 so i may go get that.

My friend points out that i should have a trial on iworks not sure about office but am sure there will be a download some place to try it out.

Only really use the word processing part though works on office xp and 2003. Though i suppose excel or the apple version might be used for my timesheets.

Not exactly sure what i'd need to go back to Xp though am sure i got stuff that won't work on Mac. Mainly entertainment games etc... though i got a Wii and thats great!

So game wise i won't really need to think about. Though would be cool to run half-life. Not so bothered about the mud.

Am sure i'll dump windows eventually but the golden rule is that not everyone has a mac. Lots more have a Pc at home. So I'd rather have something i can flip into if i need to.

Heard that leopards firewall is a tad less robust than tigers one. Antivirus & firewall software do i need it? What would you suggest?

straycat
7th-November-2007, 11:31 AM
Cheers for the info about parallel. I can easily get 2gb cause it costs £35 quid. Unlike the £85 it would of cost from the apple online store :really:
Good call. Apple's RAM prices can be exhorbitant.



4gb only costs £115 so i may go get that.
That'd be what I'd do, for that price. Where do you get your RAM?



My friend points out that i should have a trial on iworks not sure about office but am sure there will be a download some place to try it out.
Forgot that - yes - it should be installed. And if not, yes - you can download the full trial.



Only really use the word processing part though works on office xp and 2003. Though i suppose excel or the apple version might be used for my timesheets.

Sounds to me like iWork should be fine. Certainly give the trial a good go before getting Office.



Not exactly sure what i'd need to go back to Xp though am sure i got stuff that won't work on Mac. Mainly entertainment games etc... though i got a Wii and thats great!
Most things work fine on Bootcamp / Parallels, from what I hear. Including HL. What MUD do you use?

And do you have MP3 yet for the Wii? I'm absolutely in awe of that game...



Am sure i'll dump windows eventually but the golden rule is that not everyone has a mac. Lots more have a Pc at home. So I'd rather have something i can flip into if i need to.
Myself, I'm looking forward to getting an Intel Mac one day - if only so that I can run IE on my Mac desktop - so I can develop websites on a Mac, and not require a PC to test 'em on....



Heard that leopards firewall is a tad less robust than tigers one. Antivirus & firewall software do i need it? What would you suggest?
Mmm. I haven't really looked into this. I don't run AV software on my Mac, although a good bet would be Clam (http://www.clamxav.com/). Firewall - again, I use a router, which maintains a good firewall, so I'm not so worried about deficiencies in the Leopard one - and I'm sure they'll fix any problems fairly smartly. On a related note though, I would advise getting hold of a copy of Little Snitch (http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html) - it's a great little program which blows the whistle on anything on your machine that wants to talk to the outside world when you might not want it to...

Wuzzle
7th-November-2007, 12:18 PM
I get my memory from crucial.com/uk, I was rather less than happy with looking at the apple pricing for their memory :what: £85? for 2gb... £507 for 4gb :rofl:sweetbeejeeeusss...!

Mudwise i used to play razors edge and admin Chaos Empire. However from what i hear edge is dead and chaos is really only running for happy memories...

Don't have the time to sit for hours too much social life to stay inside.

Haven't got MP3 yet looks awesome, I still have zelda in its wrapper when i bought the wii back in march. I'm going to get Mario galaxies / Kart when its out. You played resident evil on the wii its great... Completing paper mario at the moment :D and trying to become a professional Baseball star again......(nephew used my character while i was a away, so am not a pro at anything any more :tears:)

If only Mac and Nintendo got together! Now that would be a really sweet thing! :clap:

I'll have a lookie at clam and definately get little snitch! Windows will just have to run with symantec and maybe zonelarm. Though not sure if i'd need it them be fair.

ducasi
7th-November-2007, 02:25 PM
Standard firewall on 10.4 was a waste of time – if you wanted to run a service on a particular port, you would have to open the port to the whole world. And if you don't want to run that service, the firewall will block the port you are not listening to anyway.

Now Leopard has per-program access, it might be better, but there's still no way to say things like "only local connections". So still pretty useless, but can now do a little about programs using the network without your permission.

Personally, I currently intend to run my Leopard machines without a firewall or any virus protection. But based on the level of perceived risk, and the availability of useful tools, I may change my mind.