ITunes7

[BearintheBigBlueHouse]

rocks.

Sorry - should have given you a geek warning first.

iTV - intuitive wireless media centre, working WITH everything else. I mean, really, how could you not have one?

Geek alert over.

Blimey Bear, you sound like my dh....

yeah, but that can't be a bad thing can it?

anyroad up I need help - another geek warning - I need an external hard drive to run alonside my Powerbook - any recommendations, was thinking about going for one of the little LaCie ones, good idea or bad? Need more room for video editing and design work and am running up against full memory in the PB. TIA

depends .

We have a lacie one I think (at inlaws atm as we use it as a back up in case of theft etc). dh quite likes it as far as I know and it has a lot of space.

(from a not so colourful animal who lives in the woods)

I'd start off with the interface. Depending on the model of Powerbook you have it'll have a Firewire 400 port and possibley a Firewire 800 (late-2003 15" and all 17"). That was also the year they added USB 2 ports, which are about equivalent to
firewire 400 in performance.

If you've got a firewire 800 port, I'd use that. For video editing if you get a firewire 800 box with a 7200rpm drive with 8MB cache it'll be much, much faster than the internal drive in the PB.

cheers Blue, but if I upgrade sometime to the MacBook Pro (not imminent, but probably likely at some stage) - am I right in thinking that they no longer have Firewire, so in order to be futureproof I need one that supports both Firewire800 and USB2?

USB2 will work anywhere. The MacBook & MacBook Pro 15" have FW400. The NacBook Pro 17" has a FW800 too. You can get boxes with all three. If you want La Cie they have a number of 'triple interface' boxes - Hard drive Extreme d2 & 'Big Disk' look like they have all three.

D'oh! I realised as soon as I'd posted that it's not the MacBookPro line that's dropped FW, but iPods. Thanks for the advice - I'll get onto it now. My PB has USB2 and FW800. Are you prepared to be my online tutor when I get the drive and power it up?? I don't necessarily want LaCie - it's just that I've seen good reviews - I'm after what's best for the purpose, easily available and not too big (I work from the kitchen table, so need to have a small footprint, lest DW throw a wobbly).

Thanks again.
Bear

lol Bluebear knows SO much more than me .

Bear, all I would say is that dh (although an apple nut) isn't 100% competent at these type of things and he managed to sort ours out in about 5 mins. Oh, also we bought from Micro Anvika, who were doing a much better deal than the Apple Store at the time. HTH.

Blue - this would do the jobthen ? only 5400 but to get 7200 I'd need a bigger unit I guess.

Can I just confesss that the posts below were from Mr Bluebear (who is a mac geek working in the industry) and not the usual bear, who uses a mac mini but lets Mr BB do all the tough stuff.

He'll be back from work later NITBBH and stealing my identity again I'm sure.

Whoever it was, I'm grateful for the advice, and while we're being all open and honest, can I just admit that I didn't take the advice. Well I did take some, but I really needed the drive today and the only local Apple Reseller didn't have any Lacies in stock and I ended up buying a Formac external drive almost A4 sized which was not what I originally wanted and only FW400. D'oh, but in my defence, I could only play with the hand I was dealt. In my defence, it runs 7200rpm and has an 8MB cache.

Oh and my original thoughts on iTunes7 are also flawed, it appears a tad buggy. Double d'oh. Still way better than anything Schmindows has ever done.

Anyway, I have a deadline for this videoediting, so I'd better get on with it.

thanks, I am very grateful for your help