OT: Apple Mac computers

Your not the only one who can do magic ;-)

Might as well at that price. That should eliminate lack of ram from any equation for some time to come (unless you switch to vista!)

I don't usually heckle wankers but I'm bored.

Nobody is listening to you anymore Dennis...

You are you stupid wanker.

I doubt anyone is that stupid

Dave

Professional curtsey I presume?

Just the put down for the put downs.

Buy a MacBook Pro and it includes this and Leopard.

A large scale backup regime uses a variety of methods to ensure that media are loaded properly, in sequence and appropriate base, differential and incremental backups are made as appropriate for the environment.

The typical small business or home user is not going to go to all this trouble and would tend to do nothing. Hard drive fails in machine and goodnight Vienna. USB external drives are inexpensive enough that multiple ones can be used in a simple rotation to provide a usable and effective backup arrangement suitable for this type of user.

I didn't say that at all.

If by "fully functional backup program" you mean an enterprise scaled solution requiring an IT staff to run it then clearly this is not. Windows doesn't provide that either.

Time Machine is an effective means of backing up for a home or SME user and is plug and go. It doesn't set out to be a large enterprise tool

I said nothing of the sort

I'm not sure that you do.

You do, but that is a painless exercise because it doesn't have to deal with all of the multiplicity of hardware, drivers and so on leading off in different directions.

Once that's complete, the Time Machine drive can be plugged in and the rest of the applications and user data can be restored very simply. One reason for this is that both of these are not liberally sprinkled around the machine.

Another similar capability is with data migration from machine to machine - e.g. it's simple to do a complete transfer using either ethernet or Firewire connection. There aren't the issues of different HALs and all that stuff that can make this kind of thing difficult in Windows.

I didn't say that it was fully functional an dthis was somewhat tongue in cheek.

Personally I wouldn't run Exchange at all

Yes. It's a piece of crap and I removed it.

Mmm....

Typical tactic.

Agreed.

I wouldn't put you on any machine...... :-)

Saw bench?

You haven't had the invoice yet ;-)

Yes I agree, but how to know?

Yes, and very good it was too. They've now bundled it with a lot of crap that isn't really needed and the average user can't reasonably be expected to know what the hell it's doing.

Right, but that somewhat specific niche is not the "bottom end of the price scale" that I was talking about. Pretty much by definition, since the available options were more expensive than the cheapest Mac :-)

Pete

Happy with your can of worms yet, Dave? :-)

Pete

It's a night out for him, and a night off for his family.

( Attrib. unknown, but last heard being delivered by Paul Merton ).

Regards,

There are a number of methods - the best of which is research. Typing the name of a program into Google often reveals any issues that other users have come up against. It also helps to be slightly tardy about installing updates - and never allow programs to update automatically.

I have used a few 'tracking' utilities that can monitor an installation ( and provide an independent uninstall if necessary ) - but by far and away the most effective method is to Ghost or image the OS partition before installing a new app.

I haven't run into any issues by not using it these days - NTFS seems to take care of itself, by and large. About the most useful utility in my toolbox these days is the Ultimate Boot CD, or a 'Bart disk'.

Regards,