All's Well.......

[penolta]

mtngal wrote:

My printer needs replacing anyway. Would my current Linksys router work with Mac, or would I need to replace it, too? I'd end up getting the Mac laptop for myself with a big monitor. Out of curiosity, can you set up dual monitors with the iMac? Not that I'm planning on it, but I've gotten rather spoiled with dual 30" Dell monitors at work...

I'm not sure I can answer your questions because I haven't gotten that far in the process myself. You printer should work, if there is a mac driver for it (if it is Plug and Play there may already be a driver in the Mac OS. The OS certainly supports two monitors and there are plenty of I/O ports on the iMac (video out, fire wire,and 5 USB - 3 on the monitor and 2 on the wiredkeyboard) soitprobably does too. Don't know about the router - check the manufacturer's web site. CS3 has added support for the K20D and K200D.

[DigitalAddict]

On the topic of imaging backup: aside from making sure my images are on at least two hard drives (in one format at least), once in a while I would backup on DVDs, one copy going to the bank's safe box. The problem is that they fill up quick: my 500GB secondary is already full.

Recently I bought 10GB of online storage on Photoshelter Archive and use it for JPGs although it can take RAWs (even makes thumbnails out of them).
It is different than other services in the sense that one could sell licenses (an add-on option). It also offers batch keywording, captioning etc. It allows for IPTC editing but does not care much for EXIF a la pbase, flickr etc.

For about $10 per month makes me sleep a lot better.

[NonEntity1]

This thread has gone in two different directions, so let me add my $.02 to both. Paul's warning is excellent. My method of backing up is somewhat different, I have all of the computers in my house networked and as soon as photos are uploaded to mine I copy them over to my wife's computer. My daughter's computer has about 1.5 years worth of photos and duplicates of all of our music. When Micro$oft finally works the bugs out of Home Server I plan to pull an old computer out of the graveyard and build a server to do automatic backups of every machine on the network.

As far as Vista, I am a Vista (64 bit version) user. I bought it fairly early on because it is the only MS operating system to support directx 10, which I anticipated being important for computer gaming. My impression is somewhere in the middle of "it sucks" and it's great." The big negative is getting older software to work, though with a little effort I have managed to get everything I use working just fine, and that includes one DOS program running on an emulator and several Windows 95 era programs. On the "meh" side, it really does not offer anything that XP did not have, aside from DX 10, and that has not turned out to be particularly important for gaming. Our newest current computer is my wife's and I ordered that with XP.

My advice would be to order an XP machine if that is an option. However, I would not turn up my nose at a good price on a Vista machine just because it is Vista. Since Vista is something of a resource hog, expect to get better performance out of XP on identical hardware. As Tsquare mentioned, you can still buy XP machines from Dell Small Business (not Dell Home) and you do not pay any more for that option. XP will no longer be offered by system builders after the middle of this month, though M$'s license generally allows you to downgrade operating systems if you have a license for a more recent one.

Tim