Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

That's good to know, I'm not so worried about graphics as I want it for a music production/recording thing but the more cores/ram/ports the better.

Issue we have these days is that the RAM's glued/soldered on, so you HAVE to buy Apple RAM. Spendy. And yeah, there's not nearly so many ports any more. You'll almost certainly need a dock of some sort - there's no firewire any more, for example, and only 2 USB holes.

Yeah I'd heard that about the RAM. Newest macbook has 2x the ram of the older macbook for approx the same price, which is good. Just had a quick look at docks, they seem quite a good idea in general, although $$$

Apple ram isn't too badly priced anymore, at least not when I compared to crucial the other week

If you need FireWire for music peripherals, you can get thunderbolt adaptors.

Quick simple question.

I have a mac with SSD hd and also HD in disc draw. I need to run a windows OS for some math software and windows CAD etc.

Is there any way of switching between partitions without shutting down one OS? I'd rather put windows on the SSD as a partition if I can as the modeling software will run faster on there. If I put the OS on different HD would that work? Incase I want to work in Mac but then need to flip to windows to check something, without quitting everything.
If putting it on a differnt HD works and I can flip between HD then I'll but another SSD I think.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you could run windows in a virtual machine using VMware, parralels or virtualbox (free) and just have the windows install on the hard drive.
That way, you'd be running it from within OS X.

Yeah you understand my thought. Thanks. Yeah but I need to run Auto CAD, 3D modelling and math matrix software, so it's kind of intensive. Not something I want to do in a virtual machine.

I guess the best option is to run windows on a partition and then just access documents on the mac to edit, I'll just get Office on there too, then I can do reports on windows and not really use Mac OS.

I wondered if it was possible to swap (without shutting down) between 2 operating systems running simultaneously, on the same laptop.

From what I understand, which isn't a lot, nope. A motherboard can only run one bios thing at a time which means one OS.

You can't run more than one OS at the same time, as they've said ^.

OSX does save your windows though so when you go back into it everything should be as you left it. If you haven't saved your work it will prompt you.

I discovered the other day that even written but unposted forum posts survive a restart :)

To access documents on the mac to edit from Windows, you'd need to make sure the drive in question was NTFS format, not Mac OS format.

You'd also need to manually enable NTFS write access if you wanted to put files on that drive from your Mac, as stupidly Apple gave OSX the ability to write to NTFS drives but left it turned off by default.

Edit: LINK REMOVED

Thanks.

Good point about formatting. What a ball ache this becomes.

Maybe I'll just replace the old HD in the disc draw with a 250g SSD. That should be enough to run windows and all the software fine. That way they're on different drives completely.

Seems simpler and cleaner option that partitioning 1 hard drive with 2 different formats.

If you run a VM from an SSD, you shouldn't suffer performance wise. It's pretty slick these days.

Yeah. I would just rather run them separately than one inside the other. I think... I'll give it a go. Thanks for the help.

It becomes even more of a ball ache I'm afraid. Since 10.9.2 it turns out Apple broke the way I linked to of manually enabling NTFS write access. I just tried it and I couldn't remount the drive until I'd taken out the additional string in the fstab file. There are ways of getting write access another way but they involved third party drivers and YMMV.

I'd recommend separate drives over two partitions. I used to run my Windows/Mac OS on two partitions, but the problem is that Windows is an antisocial wotsit and when you install big updates it will fuck about with the Master Boot Record (MBR) and the next thing you know you can't boot into anything but Windows (OSX never does this). Also some Windows updates wouldn't install when Windows was on a partition because it expected Windows to have the primary boot record (when if you're using the Chameleon bootloader like I am that lives on the Mac OS disk, you need the Mac OS disk to have the primary bootloader).

I actually had an issue once after installing Windows on a physically separate disk when it STILL managed to fuck up the MBR on the other disk. I still think this should have been physically impossible, but it happened. So now when I do a new Windows install I tend to unplug my Mac OS system drive out of (arguably justified) paranoia.

I don't know anything about virtual machines but two drives or a fast VM set up seem like the best options.

IT JUST WORKS*!

*with a bit of sudo

Ball ache.

Maybe I'll migrate to windows on a more permanent basis. I don't do photoshop or anything that a mac osx is better at really. I just use it as it's cleaner OS and simpler.

You could use Google drive?

Lol. Not a bad way of transferring files between the OS. But I doubt I'd need to transfer files really. Maybe a word doc or 2. But nothing substantial.

I might have to tap you up with a couple of questions about my hack if it ever bloody arrives. Quick q, cpu upgrades much hassle?

I want to ugprade the ram on my 2011 mac book pro to themac of 16gb (2x8gb).
Google tells me I need 8GB DDR3 PC3-10600.

Any recommendations on where to buy from?

Crucial. It will also do a system scan for ya.

Cheers. Just done the scan and crucial are showing no stock for 8gb sticks.

To be honest I was thinking you'd be wanting to transfer big files but actually it's perfect for that. If you download the Mac drive software it integrates into OS X and acts just like a normal drive window once you've opened it.

Yeah you're right, the integration into finder is brilliant.

Sure, although I'm definitely not an expert!

Nope. Presuming the usual PC consideration of being able to access/remove the processor easily enough. But you need to pick a processor which is as compatible as possible: you don't want to end up with an unsupported CPU.

Current list of recommended processors here:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/building-customac-buyers-guide-september-2015.html#CPUs