A Few Questions

Fad

Apologies if this is the wrong forum or the questions have already been answered.


Im getting a Macbook in the next 2 weeks (to be specific a shiney black one :pac:)

1. Is there any facility for the uncompression of .zip and .rar files on a mac.

2. Is there any word processor type application that comes on it as standard/is available free.

3.Is it possible to connect a Mac with a PC and sort of drag and drop files (music etc), or will I have to resort to more complicated measures

Thats all for the moment
Thanks

Ham'nd'egger

Fad wrote: »

Apologies if this is the wrong forum or the questions have already been answered.


Im getting a Macbook in the next 2 weeks (to be specific a shiney black one :pac:)

1. Is there any facility for the uncompression of .zip and .rar files on a mac.

2. Is there any word processor type application that comes on it as standard/is available free.

3.Is it possible to connect a Mac with a PC and sort of drag and drop files (music etc), or will I have to resort to more complicated measures

Thats all for the moment
Thanks

1) Stuffit Expander ought to do the job for you.
2) Textedit will be on your Mac and will do if it just to type up stuff and form text only documents.
3) I dunno

babypink

- the OS will do zip files itself, use unrarX for rar files.
- openoffice / neooffice?
- yes to the easy transfer

J-blk

Fad wrote: »

1. Is there any facility for the uncompression of .zip and .rar files on a mac.

2. Is there any word processor type application that comes on it as standard/is available free.

3.Is it possible to connect a Mac with a PC and sort of drag and drop files (music etc), or will I have to resort to more complicated measures

1. For rar files in particular, check out "The Unarchiver":

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22774/the-unarchiver

It also does zip and a number of other formats.

2. Yep, TextEdit is what is bundled - you can find other free ones at macupdate.com or versiontracker.com but I have no recommendations since I use Pages from iWork 08 (which will cost you around €80 for Pages, Keynote and Numbers or €50 if you can get a copy from the US - which is what I did... )

3. Not sure if you can connect a PC/Mac directly to eachother but assuming you have a router with two ethernet ports or more (four is pretty common I think) connect the PC and Mac to it and share out a folder from the PC, access it from the Mac and grab all the stuff you need. You could also do this with the Mac and PC connected to the same wireless network, though if you have several GBs to copy over, that may be quite slow.

dubmick

If you have an N router it will be very fast over a wireless network, I stream movies and music from the pc to my macbook pro

Fad

ok thanks very much so far, ive copied my ipod libary off my ipod onto my PC, I have a SeaGate external Hardrive a big 500 gig job and a small passport drive around 120 gig, would either of these be any use for transfer of files?

babypink

absolutely

Fad

ok thanks, just making sure i wont have compatiblity issues

J-blk

Fad wrote: »

ok thanks, just making sure i wont have compatiblity issues

You can read from both NTFS and FAT formatted hard drives in Mac OS X so you should have no problem reading from your current Windows-formatted drives. You can't write to NTFS right of the bat (but you can do if you need to) but that should not be an issue if all you want to do is transfer the data over to the Mac. If you plan on using your external hard drive on both a PC and the Mac, the format to use is FAT32 if you need to read/write on both ends. If you only will use the drives with the Mac, you could reformat the NTFS drive(s) to HFS+ instead.

Fad

J-blk wrote: »

You can read from both NTFS and FAT formatted hard drives in Mac OS X so you should have no problem reading from your current Windows-formatted drives. You can't write to NTFS right of the bat (but you can do if you need to) but that should not be an issue if all you want to do is transfer the data over to the Mac. If you plan on using your external hard drive on both a PC and the Mac, the format to use is FAT32 if you need to read/write on both ends. If you only will use the drives with the Mac, you could reformat the NTFS drive(s) to HFS+ instead.

Ok, well i wont pretend i know what any of that means :pac:

If i just use my iPod as a storage device can i just drag and drop off that?
(if i copy the libary on a secong time, finally a practical use for having an 80gig ipod)

Thanks

J-blk

Fad wrote: »

Ok, well i wont pretend i know what any of that means :pac:

Simple explanation: if your hard drives were formatted by Windows XP or Vista, they are almost surely in the NTFS format. If you never formatted them, it is very likely they are formatted as FAT32 instead (I have a number of Western Digital external HDDs and with the exception of one Mac-specific one I got, all have always been pre-formated as FAT32). On the Mac side, you'll end up formatting drives as HFS+ most of the time.

The plus to FAT32 is that you can read/write it on both ends. However, you can't copy single files bigger than 2GB I believe, so if you have something like a DVD iso file (which is usually 4.7GB), then you cannot copy it to a FAT32 drive. NTFS cannot easily be written from within Mac OS X but has no file restriction and HFS+ is a Mac format which is not that easy to even read in Windows - though again, it can be done.

Fad wrote: »

If i just use my iPod as a storage device can i just drag and drop off that? (if i copy the libary on a secong time, finally a practical use for having an 80gig ipod)

Yes, you can use the iPod as a storage device but I think you'll find it easier to use one of your external hard drives at the end of the day. If you want to copy your music over, don't sync with iTunes, simply copy them into a folder on the iPod (as if you were copying over any other data files) and then onto the Mac. Once done, you can sync then to the iPod. The reason for this is that when you sync to the iPod, it creates a weird file structure and gives fairly cryptic file names to all your MP3s so you better avoid that...

At the end of the day, things may seem a bit complicated now but when you get your Mac, trust me, it'll make sense Macs are very easy to get the hang of the basics at least.

Fad

J-blk wrote: »

Yes, you can use the iPod as a storage device but I think you'll find it easier to use one of your external hard drives at the end of the day. If you want to copy your music over, don't sync with iTunes, simply copy them into a folder on the iPod (as if you were copying over any other data files) and then onto the Mac. Once done, you can sync then to the iPod. The reason for this is that when you sync to the iPod, it creates a weird file structure and gives fairly cryptic file names to all your MP3s so you better avoid that...

At the end of the day, things may seem a bit complicated now but when you get your Mac, trust me, it'll make sense Macs are very easy to get the hang of the basics at least.

Ok thats everything i think,
this have been a huge help thanks

I think i ll struggle waiting until the 5th now

dubmick

J-blk wrote: »

You can read from both NTFS and FAT formatted hard drives in Mac OS X so you should have no problem reading from your current Windows-formatted drives. You can't write to NTFS right of the bat (but you can do if you need to) but that should not be an issue if all you want to do is transfer the data over to the Mac. If you plan on using your external hard drive on both a PC and the Mac, the format to use is FAT32 if you need to read/write on both ends. If you only will use the drives with the Mac, you could reformat the NTFS drive(s) to HFS+ instead.

Thanks for this, I was wondering why I could only read my WD External Drive and not write to it.

J-blk

dubmick wrote: »

Thanks for this, I was wondering why I could only read my WD External Drive and not write to it.

No problem . As I mentioned, you can write to NTFS if you need to from Mac OS X (and other *nix systems that have the same limitation, such as Linux) but last time I checked, it was not recommended and not very reliable (data loss was a real concern). I've never bothered with getting Leopard to write to NTFS as I run a copy of XP under VMware's Fusion so that eliminates that problem anyway - though at this stage, I only have one NTFS-formatted external HDD remaining...

If you're interested, the specifics can be found from this link, but it does take quite some fiddling:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

There also seems to be a commercial solution from Paragon:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

I would imagine this is easier to use but I have not used it at all, so I can't vouch for its' usefulness.