First time Mac buyer, some questions

Seemingly as Dell won't release their Studio XPS models before the end of the year (would probably not get the model in my hand till late February) I've decided to order a MacBook Pro in a few weeks.

(I will the Swedish currency (SEK) in my questions, divide the price by 8.5 to get how much I would pay in USD. The price is quite a bit higher here due to VAT and stuff like that)

I will be able to get the it with student discount, a total of 1,850 SEK (~$220), the base model would cost me 16,645 SEK (~$1960) instead of 18,495 SEK (~$2180).

My questions:

About the actual purchase:
1. Memory upgrade, should I get it now?
I'd like to have 4 GB of RAM but it will cost me 1,240 SEK (~$145) to upgrade to it. Doesn't get cheaper if would upgrade to 4 GB later as I would need to buy 2x 2 GB modules because the Pro ships with 2x 1 GB modules.

I'd be installing XP on the Pro as I have some programs that is Windows only that I use (not that many though). So far on my current notebook (2½ Asus with 1 GB RAM) I haven't allocated more than about 1.9 GB at most (quite close to the 2 GB limit I'd have with the base Pro) with it. This was while using a few Adobe CS products at once.

So should I spend the extra money on the extra 2 GB now? If I get this I won't be able to get anything else.

2. Hard drive upgrade, would I need it?
I currently have a 80 GB 4200 rpm drive in my Asus. It's very slow and I only have some 50 GB left on it with all mayor programs installed (no games or anything are installed). I run out quite fast if I need to store documents and film production stuff on it. I have 3 external drives totaling 1.32 TB (2x 500 GB, 1x 320 GB) of space.

How much space does Mac OS X take? I'd lose some 15 GB to XP and other Windows programs. How much free space would I have left? 200-ish GB? If I have more than 175-ish GB left with all programs installed I probably could make it with a 250 GB hard drive.

Buying a bigger drive from Apple would cost just about the same (about 800 SEK or $100) as buying a larger hard drive later as well.

3. Of the above two, which would be better to get, 4 GB of RAM or a bigger hard drive?

4. I won't be able to get the extended Apple Care now, but maybe within a year. Except for the phone support after 90 days, is there any reason I should I get it now instead of later?
It would set me back 2900 SEK (~$340) to buy it now.

Using it
5. What is the best player and decoder for h.264 material in OS X?
I currently use Media Player Classic with CoreAVC decoder and it works with 99.99% of everything I play. I know VLC has some issues with playing HD stuff.
Media Player Classic is also the best media player I have ever used. Is there any equivalent in OS X? I like how the seek bar works (much better than VLC (in Windows)) and that you can chose what decoder to use along with custom keys for player control.

6. Any easy way to put windows on top?
I always have my Media Player on top of every window so that I can still use my browser maximized while watching things.

7. Partitions and NTFS
Currently I have two partitions of my 80 GB hard drive, one for XP and all programs and the other for storage and my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. This means that I won't lose anything if I would need to reinstall the OS in case of an error. I would like to keep this on the MacBook Pro, so I would have 3 partitions: OS X, XP, and Storage. What tool would I need to get this to work?
As I'd need XP to read the Storage partition it would need to be NTFS. In order for OS X to read and write to it (and my 3 external hard drives for that matter), what program/extension (or whatever it's called) would give me the best performance?

8. Syncing Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.
As I would use Firefox and Thunderbird in both OS X and XP, how would I sync the profiles between them, if possible? Would simplify things if I would have updated profiles no matter what OS I am in at the time.

9. Touchpad tapping & gestures
My current touchpad is able to do some basic gestures: 2 and 3 finger swipes in vertical, horizontal and diagonal direction (I don't use diagonal fwiw) as well as tapping zones. I know it can do multiple finger gestures, and I'm interested to know if tapping zones are supported or if there is an easy way to middle click (opens links in a new tab in Firefox)?

10. OS X equivalent to some applications I use
Flash Renamer: I use it for quickly renaming lots of files at once (very useful programs), it is able to fetch data from inside the files themselves (such as MP3 info and EXIF data) as well as files sizes, date modified etc. What options are there for OS X?
ACDSee Photo Manager: Quick preview and batch conversion between file formats for images.
Editpad Pro: Any tabbed text editor which supports syntax highlighting would be fine.
Download manager: I use FlashGet as a download manager in XP as the Firefox built in fails to download some files properly and speeds are usually quite slow for some reason. Also works great if you need to batch download files. What options are there in OS X?


All I can think of at the moment. I'm sure I'll figure out some more questions soon.

 

1. mem upgrade--> keep the 2GB of apple memory, buy 4 GB of 3rd party memory from an online retailer. ask around for names. you can buy 4GB of memory for $20-$40.

3. depends on what you need- more hard drive space or more programs open at once. OSX is fine with 2GB, but 4GB is good, especially if you plan on running windows and OSX at the same time with xp in a virtual machine.

4. no, also, buy this on ebay if possible (or a 3rd party vendor) instead of direct from apple.

 

I personally will not upgrade the ram and hardrive because I do that my own.
OSX can run windows and you can run them side by side with vmware. I don't think you will face any difficulty. Regarding to the track pad, new mac computers have multiple touch, which can do what u want.

 

I assume he's getting the new unibody MacBook Pro, in that case it'll be DDR3. So the memory will be substantially more expensive. I purchased 4GB modules for about $160. Still cheaper than Apple though(since I'll sell my 1GBx2 modules)

 

You can always run Boot camp for the applications that you need. But for an even better result, using Parallels or VMWare fusion would have all the apps running simultaneously. I'm currently running it right now and it configured my boot camp partition quite fast, and it was easy, provided that you set up your Boot Camp partition first.

 

I use Niceplayer with Perian (Quicktime plugin that allows XVID, DIVX, H.264 etc). It's much better than Quicktime or even VLC.

See running VMWare Fusion, you can have your system running no different than a PC. If you are so used to having PC, I suggest running Boot Camp instead until you are ready to use OSX. Personally before I jumped onto this MBP, I was previously a heavy PC user, and switching to OSX was rather easy..

I advise not to. Bootcamp won't install if you prepartition the drive. I suggest only 2 partitions max on any MacBook or MacBook Pro with Boot Camp, If you odn't plan on running Windows(natively, without virtualization) then partition it anyway you want. As for NTFS, OSX natively can mount NTFS fine, but if you need to write to it as well getting either NTFS3G or ParagonNTFS would solve your problems.

I don't think there is a problem, Firefox runs virtually the same as on PC(except some plugins don't work).
I don't use Thunderbird, however I believe there is an OSX version. So your profiles would be compatibl.

 

Bad idea. What if you need to send it in for support?

They'll make you switch it out or not service it, as there would be no way in knowing the problem that you have did not stem from the third party RAM. Sam was telling me about that in a thread I made, along with a Apple Support thread that I made in Apple's forums.

 

Flash Renamer has a built-in OS X equivalent, Automator, it can do that for you!

 

If I buy the upgrade to 4 GB from Apple it would cost me about $145. If I would buy it from somewhere else 2x 2 GB would cost me about $150-155 including shipping.

I probably will be able to work with 2 GB, but 4 GB would be nice to have. The question is, should I buy the RAM from Apple (slightly cheaper than buying it from any other store at the same time), or wait for the prices to drop?

I would not sell the original sticks if I would get 3rd party RAM. I'd troubleshoot first to see if the memory is the problem before I would send it back to Apple with the original RAM.


I know there are some issues with the unibody; The crooked keys and loose battery cover for instance. From what I've here and on other forums they were more frequent on the earlier weeks of production. Will buying a base config increase the likelihood of getting an "older" model that may be affected by the above problems?

I'd prefer to shift most of my work to OS X, and I'd like to find OS X equivalents to the above programs.

I know Photoshop can batch-convert but it is slower than ACDSee Photo Manager. Will iPhoto be able to batch convert? I was able to try it briefly on my uncle's iMac last year (basically just got to preview some photos).

A text editor shouldn't be that hard to find, just asking what people are experienced with.

I'll try that out when I get the MacBook Pro then.

I'll try it and see how it works out.

On Google I found Afloat, a review of it said it worked with most applications. Has anyone here tried it?

This seem to be a solution:

I know how to fix boot problems for Windows with the fixboot etc. if needed. I still would need to be able to read and write from my 3 external drives which all are NTFS and I would need to read and write from them, what gives me the best performance, NTFS3G or ParagonNTFS or something else?

Good that they are (or should be) compatible. Is OS X shell scripting able to compare timestamps of files? If it is, I should be able to write a script which creates a backup of the old files and replaces them with new ones.

This is unless there is some easier way to sync them of course. I would still need something for Windows though.

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One more thing (see attachment), what is the thing on the front of the MacBook Pro (red-arrow)? IR?

 

That is correct, its the IR sensor! Right next to it (its hidden inside the aluminum casing) is the Sleep light; it "snoozes" (fades in and out) when your notebook is sleeping.

 

If you upgrade yourself, then you will still have left over the original sticks that came with your Mac. Since you do not immediately require 4GB of memory, I would recommend you to wait until prices on DDR3 SO-DIMMs have come down a bit, before replacing your Mac's memory.

No one really knows this, although do remember that most people do not have these problems.

Your best bet for that would be to get Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture. iPhoto has a some plug ins for batch conversion, although the most obvious solution would be to use Automator.

Textmate, although it's not free. You can occasionally get it for a very low price, however.

It keeps windows always on top. Can be useful if you need such features.

It is a hack. There are a number of different ways to install multiples OSes on a Mac, but officially Boot Camp only supports one partition containing a Windows installation.

They're both equally bad in my opinion. I would suggest for you to set up a gigabit network between your computers, so that you can access your NTFS drives plugged in to a Windows machine across the network.

OS X is built on UNIX, so most commands in UNIX are available.

It's the IR port and the power indicator light.