A few questions

The Black Oil

Hiya,

I've an iMac running Leopard and there are a few niggles bothering me.

1. Upon starting/logging in, I have Safari & Firefox set to start automatically. Safari just opens to Google, FF opens 5 - tabs - Google, BBC x 2, RTE News & a blank tab. Thing is, it can take a 2-3 minutes before either browser is essentially usable. Is this normal? It's been this way for ages and I used not to have them set to open automatically and previously only had 2GB of RAM. Safari opens Google just fine (usually), but as soon as you go to open another tab or site the beach ball takes over for a while, FF is usually ahead of it (if memory serves).

2. I have Windows running on Bootcamp for games. At the time I allocated around 30GB of HD space to Windows as I thought that would be plenty, but games do eat up space. Is it possible to allocate more without having to wipe the whole machine? I presume not...

3. Relates to above, if I do have to start over and use a Time Machine backup, what happens there? Do I reinstall Leopard and tell Time Machine to load stuff on - does it just throw everything on, files or settings as well? I've only recently started using TM.

4. Don't really need an answer as I should find out myself, but I seem to have used quite a lot of space (though there's about 260 GB free so I shouldn't complain). Apart from apps, iTunes, a few photos and maybe a few ripped DVDs...what else is likely to hog space? Is there a way of seeing where your biggest stuff is?

Thanks

conor.hogan.2

yes setting two browsers to open up on login can take a while

as far as i know once you partition - thats it you have to make a new one.

can you use timemachine to backup windows??

diskinventoryx - will show you whats taking up space.

J-blk

The Black Oil wrote: »

4. Don't really need an answer as I should find out myself, but I seem to have used quite a lot of space (though there's about 260 GB free so I shouldn't complain). Apart from apps, iTunes, a few photos and maybe a few ripped DVDs...what else is likely to hog space? Is there a way of seeing where your biggest stuff is?

WhatSize is excellent for this but unfortunately it's not free:

http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

The Black Oil

Thanks

I was thinking of moving to Snow Leopard on my iMac, but I'm not sure. From Googling, Office 2004 can be a bit grumpy/not work too well on SL. iWork/Pages or Open Office might be an alternative option, though. Perhaps changing my Macbook from Tiger to SL is more worthwhile. Or else, if it ain't broke, don't fix it...(for both).

silvine

I use Office on the Mac. It's quiet slow compared to Pages. Office takes about 5-10 second to load. Pages is almost instant.

Dorsanty

re: the space usage I personally find jDiskReport the best and one of the few java apps I find useful.

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

Java means it works on all platforms too so one tool to do the same task on all machines. This Java thing might take off...

re: Time machine restore, you'll be asked during account setup after fresh install to point at a Time Machine backup it will determine what's available for restore and you pick what you want e.g. restore Apps, restore user Downloads etc.

The Black Oil

I did a clean install of SL onto my Tiger Macbook. Not sure how it will work out. I put iLife (from the Tiger discs) and it's saying iMovie won't work as it's iMovie 07. It's not something I really use on that machine. iDVD and iPhoto seem OK, though I only opened them, didn't edit anything, etc. The first time I put SL on today it seemed to upgrade as it didn't wipe any apps, Word, etc, but the second time I went for a clean install and that wiped the whole shebang.

I'm having doubts about whether it's worth upgrading (or doing a clean install) the iMac from Leopard to SL. I should probably have done my homework a little more thoroughly.