New to the Mac world with questions

[KatmanDu]

Well, about a month ago I upgraded the video card in my 4 year old home-built PC (P4 2.4 GHz, 2 meg RAM) that I had been using for photo and video editing (and Battlefield:2142) and noticed that several of the electrolytic capaciters around the power connector on the motherboard had crust on the tops... a sign to me that they're leaking electrolyte and aren't much longer for the world. So, I started off on the research path to upgrading everything. But, while browsing around Microcenter, I stumbled across the Apple section and saw the 24" iMac running XP on Parallels. Holy goombah, that display looked good; and XP seemed to run pretty fast, considering.

Obviously, by the title of the post, I succumbed and took it home with me; along with a 500 gig LaCie Firewire 800 external drive. Now, I've been a PC user for the past 20 years, and usually made snide remarks about scruffy Mac users while secretly envying their interface; so this has been a learning experience. I'm happy with my purchase; Lightroom runs much faster compared to my old PC and my serial number exchange for CS2 when through and it should be here shortly. But I still have questions; mainly with the external drive... I understand that Macs are picky about unmounting "hotswappable" devices, and Lightroom asks to unmount the CF card when I've finished importing pictures from it; but will OS X (10.4.9) automatically unmount the Firewire drive on shutdown?

Aaaaand... any good, informative, free from rhetoric and juvenile arguing, new-user-friendly forums for the Mac around?

[Man of 1000 Ages]

You shouldn't have to worry about unmounting drives before shutting down. That will be taken care of automatically, as will mounting them on startup, assuming you don't power down the external drive. If you do, turning it on will automatically mount it.

As far as new-user-friendly mac forums? Probably a little hard to find:) One website I would highly recommend is Mac OS X Hints (http://www.macosxhints.com). They will tell you just about everything you need to know and they do have a forum as well.

[bieber]

Yeah, things will be unmounted at shutdown. Just make sure you never unplug it while the computer's on without unmounting it (just drag desktop icon to trash icon on dock).

[purelithium]

The "unmounting" thing, it's basically the same idea as XP, just "Eject" the drive before you remove it, there'll be no problems. Even if you disconnect it before you Eject it, OSX will swear at you, say you did a bad thing, but as long as you weren't accessing the drive or writing to it, it shouldn't be damaged. I just always try to remember to Eject it by dragging the icon to the trashbin, or hitting the little eject in Finder just in case.

Check out the MacRumors Forums.

http://forums.macrumors.com/index.php

I got my start on Apple computers there, and that's the first place I go whenever I'm stumped with a Mac-related problem. Fantastic people, justl ike here, and always quick answers if they know them.

Just go there, look around, search around for "newbie" threads and read read read. ;)

Have fun with your iMac!

[KatmanDu]

Thanks for the comments... I did find an article on the forums mentioned about drives unmounting on shutdown. Now, if only my mac copy of CS2 would get here...

[purelithium]

Remember that CS2 is going to be slow, compared to the performance you had on your XP machine. CS2 is coded for the older Power PC Macs. The new Intel macs have to transcode the programs with a feature of OSX called Rosetta, this enables you to use older programs with the newer machines, but at a performance loss. The more RAM you have, the less of a performance loss it is.

CS3 that's coming out soon will be fully compatible with both old and new macs (called a Universal Binary, or UB). If you don't mind the performance of

[Wsman2]

Apple has their own forums (http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa) you can also check out.

[DavidEB]

took me a while to learn this when I switched from PC to mac.... all the stuff you used to worry about, all the technical details that occupied your time, no longer matter. just use it, relax and enjoy the ride.

[purelithium]

took me a while to learn this when I switched from PC to mac.... all the stuff you used to worry about, all the technical details that occupied your time, no longer matter. just use it, relax and enjoy the ride.

But the beauty of it is if you like that stuff, you can have it, via the Terminal. Or you can completely ignore it. It's all up to you!