In regard to the interiors, depending on what brand you buy or you build it yourself, an interior of a PC can be very clean and tangle-free. Alienware does a really good job of this. Additionally, if you build it yourself, you can buy modular power supplies along with cases that offer compartments to keep everything nice and clean and easy for upgrades.
Just make sure you do not buy a Dell box. As nice as they look outside, they are a real mess inside. HPs are a lot neater. But if you plan any sort of upgrade, you probably have to switch the PSU. Then you can rewire the box to your own specifications. The rest of the wires are usually not such a big deal. And if you buy locally (e.g. BestBuy), I would have them open their display model and see for myself.
Thanks mitchell. It's going to take awhile because I am planning on looking for a local place or person to put together a turnkey pc. It would be so nice to start out for a change not having to try and add peripherals, cards, etc. and get it all working together smoothly. I'm semi handicapped now so it's much more difficult to do what I used to do.
And then, after it's finally built, I'll have to retrain myself on Windows. Keeps the brain young, right!
Petey, my Mac is too old to have the 64 bit feature and I don't know much about it. If I'm switching I may as well spend the energy learning about how it works with Win 7.
Thanks for your help. I'm searching now for a way to reformat my drives. One possibility I found mentioned was to use Paragon. No direct mention of that feature on their website so I'll have to ask. Another place mentioned MacDrive 8. I have 7 but that website doesn't mention formatting a Mac drive to NTFS either. If it will, I will cost less to upgrade to 8. I'll still be using my little Macbook. Hopefully. It still runs Tiger which has been much kinder to me.
marliz,
don't worry about formatting drives to NTFS as long as you have enough space to move the data off the drive, before the format. You can simply right click a drive and format from within Win7, but this is of course a destructive process so all data is over-written.
you may find an application that purports to convert partitions between formats without data loss but even then I would advise that you back up data before you try them so the simple backup-format-restore is just as good, and normally quicker too
Barman, I'm the backup paranoia queen. I must at least two interior drives, three for photos, and at least a half dozen others. I keep the largest ones sycnced everytime I do any work (it will be so good to get this Mac back in working condition so I can work until I get a new PC) And I swap them out every week or so with an off site backup at my daughter's home. It's so bad I take the lastest backup with me when we go somewhere in case the house burns down! I've got years of work on those drives!
When I tried to reformat a Mac formatted drive to NTFS with my windows laptop, Windows XP2 didn't see the drive at all. Maybe it would be different for Win 7?
The disk management application in windows will see the partutions even if it does not recognise them - you often see this type of thing where OS1 cannot recognise a format that is developed after it is released - windows does tend to get updated through service packs to correct this (With mac i believe this is more of a OS revision though the same principle applies).
If the OS itself does not see the partition there are many 3rd part applications (free and commercial), that will.
One I use all the time is Partition Magic - free for personal use - that has it's own boot CD version which is totally independent of the OS, and is therefore a good choice for OS work.
Magic Server Partition Manager Software - Resize partition for Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2000.
That is really helpful. I used Partition Magic often with my PCs. Had to pay for it back then. I recently purchased a highly recommended Mac program, iPartition, but is was a bit limited in formatting choices and not as flexible as I remember Partition Magic.
Thank you!
The original Partition Magic is still on sale - but it did have a lot of issues during the early days of windows 7 so I would not advise using it although they may have now corrected the issues.
The partition wizard software I linked to is fully win7 compatible, (you can find some good tutorials on its use in our tutorial section)
A lot of the home Dell desktops I've worked on were all pretty messy on the inside. Dell definitely puts in an extra effort on the business line though.
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