Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 18, 2010 in
Apple 
As mention in my Happy Mac Day post I was awaiting delivery of the Apple Time Capsule ,and as assumed it did arrive today.
I have to say, Apple once again made setting up and installing this device an absolute pleasure !
Below are the unboxing pics
..and finally a picture of it inplace
Now in true Apple style, the setup was flawless, I put it on the shelf, I plugged it in, and that was it ! The iMacs and MacBook Pro all popped up with a prompt saying Time Capsule detected, do you want to set up Time Machine ?
Click yes, input the password and your away.
Did this on all the Macs in the house. The initial backup took a little while, however after that there is a silent hourly backup which you don’t even notice, and it’s good to know my data is now safe !
As you can see from the last image, I’m a little paranoid about my data, on the left I have the 2TB Acer Aspire Easystore, in the middle I have the 500GB Western Digital My Book World, and obviously on the right is the Time Capsule.
I tend to store the majority of my data on the EasyStore as this is set up with Raid 5, giving 1.5Tb of storage and losing only 500Gb to the parity recovery. I did use the MyBookWorld, however upgrading the firmware broke it, and had to spend the best part of a week recovering the data.
So with all this backup, why have I got the time capsule you may ask ?, well let me tell you.
I have a tendency of keeping an extremely clean desktop. If possible I will have nothing on it, however will use it as a temporary file store for the work I’m currently doing. Once I’ve done I tend to just delete everything, and then empty the recycle bin. Unfortunately on more than 1 occasion I’ve needed one of the files I’ve deleted.
Another reason is because C doesn’t tend to use the EasyStore as much as I, and tend to keep everything on her desktop on her iMac and MacBookPro, which means if the worst case happened, she would lose everything !
All in all, I’m very happy with this addition to my network, and can highly recommend getting one if you have a Mac
Tags: absolute pleasure, acer, Apple, Apple Time, aspire, backup, Below, capsule, delivery, desktop, device, digital, easystore, everything, firmware, Happy, imac, imacs, inplace, mac, Mac Day, macbook, macbookpro, machine, macs, mention, mybookworld, parity, picture, pleasure, post, pro, raid 5, setup, shelf, storage, style, time, time capsule, time machine, today, Western, western digital, worst case
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 17, 2010 in
Apple 
Well after much consideration, I finally took to plunge and bought a 27″ iMac.
I’ve been running Mac OSX on my PC now for a good few months, and I’ve also got a MacBook Pro. A couple of things were holding me back, first of all gaming ability. As you are probably more than aware, I game….alot ! and the majority of games come out on the PC. Now I know you can run Parallels desktop, and similar wine based software to allow you to run up Windows games on the mac, but there seems to be only a handful of games that run 100%.
Currently I have the option to boot up my Windows 7 drive in my PC and all is good. I was aware of bootcamp too, however until last week I’d not put this to use.
As mentioned, last week, I was going on a VB.net training course and had to put Windows on my Mac, in case I needed to run through anything on a evening….installed windows XP, installed the Bootcamp drivers, and everything ran very smooth 
Another announcement 2 weeks ago which helped sway my decision was the announcement of Steam coming to the Mac in April, and they would also be bringing with them the Valve games. They’ve also said that if you already own any of the Steam games, eg Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress, there is no need to repurchase them !
So the decision was made at the weekend and I bought and iMac 27″. I decided to go with the Quad Core i5 version as I don’t plan on replacing this for a couple of years. When I say I bought 1, I actually mean that I ordered 2, and C wanted one too, as our current machines are around 2 1/2 years old.
I decided as we will have 2 iMacs and 2 MacBook Pros, it was only sensible to get a Time Capsule too. We do currently use our 2Tb Acer Aspire EasyStore for the majority of our storage, but through it would be advantageous to have the Time Capsule for the “what if” factor.
As you can guess by the title of this post, today everything has turned up !
Below are the images of the unboxing of both the iMacs and the the Time Capsule apparently turns up tomorrow.
The huge brown boxes
Unboxed from said brown boxes
Unboxed
The Keyboard
Keyboard and Mouse
Again, the keyboard and mouse
This is how slim the magic mouse is
and this size of the keyboard
Size of the screen, compared to my 15.4″ MacBook Pro
The spec from the box
Finally in place
C with the original PC in place
Both in position
and finally to give you an idea of the screen resolution, below is a google search ! Look at all the white !
Finally, how is it ?
Let me tell you, it’s huge, it’s fast, it’s deadly quiet, and it’s Apple !…..so yup it works really well. The mouse and keyboard are taking a little getting used to, apart from that, I’m loving it !
Tags: 27", acer, alot, announcement, Apple, aspire, based software, bootcamp, capsule, consideration, core, couple, decision, desktop, easystore, everything, game, half life, handful, i5, imac, imacs, images, keyboard, mac, Mac OSX, macbook, macbook pro, majority, mouse, Parallel, parallels, PC. Now, place, plunge, pro, quad, screen, Size, steam, storage, team fortress, time, time capsule, Unboxed, unboxing, valve, week, windows, windows games, windows xp, wine
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Jan 15, 2009 in
Tech 
I’ve added to my toy collection, I’ve bought (as the title would suggest) a new NAS Drive.
I’ve has for the pass couple of years a 500Gb Western Digital MyBookWorld, which as ….well ok, well, slow, unstable, and over heats all the time.
I had quite a manual process to back this up too, I had to keep a machine on all the time, to run a scheduled task, to sync all the contents on the NAS drive to an external 500Gb hard drive, this was effective, however kind of overkill for a simple backup solution.
btw, the reason I’m so paranoid about backup, is a new firmware came out for the NAS drive, so I thought “OOOO, possible speed increase”, so upgraded, and it fell over Grrrrrr !, you can only imagine the paid and suffering I went though to a retrieve the content from the drive, the rebuild the linux partitions….not something I really want go through again.
Anyway, back to the Acer NAS drive, this drive is quick !, and I mean really quick !! (ok, getting around 18Mb /sec transfer speed, so about 3 times faster that the MyBookWorld)
It’s got an Itunes and Media server which supports Vob files (a god send for me streaming HD content to my PS3.
Currently running in Raid 5 (as raid 10 (0+1) isn’t available, so getting high read speeds, ok’ish write speeds, and 1.5TB of parity backup storage
It does come with Wireless access too, however this is switched off as it’s connected to my Gigabit network.
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4 x Serial ATA Hard Drives |
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10/100/1000 Ethernet, auto MDI/MDIX |
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MP3, WAV/PCM, WMA, AC3/AAC, OGG, AIF/AIFF |
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VOB, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9 |
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19 V 150 W external power adapter |
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Tags: 500gb hard drive, acer, aspire, AVI, backup, backup solution, backup storage, client, content, digital, disk, drive, gigabit, gigabit network, hard, hard disk drive, itunes, Linux, Mac OS, media server, MPEG, mybookworld, nas, Network, parity, power, Raid, raid 10, raid 5, raid level, serial ata hard drives, server, SMB, speed, speed increase, support, technical specifications, time, toy collection, transfer speed, vob, vob files, Western, western digital, windows, wireless access, X
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