New Mac user with problems

[oynaz]

Hi guys

I recently got a Mac, and have quite a few problems with it. I hope you can help:

1. I keep all my music (about 30 Gb) on a Synology NAS, accessible on my wireless network. I try to get iTunes to index it, but it goes sloooowly, but still reports progress, and pauses the the process every time I am away from the keyboard for a while. After some hours, iTunes just seems to give up on closes.

2. I have a Canon Pixma IP5200R, also on the wireless network. I can install the drivers and software, but the Mac is unable to find the printer.

3. I have Microsoft Office 2008 installed, and need to open and edit .odt files. According to Microsoft, Word 2007 and newer are able to do that, but that is apparently not true for the Mac version? I know I can install OpenOffice.org, but I would prefer to use Word.

4. I have an external HDD formatted in NTFS. The Mac can read from it, but are unable to write to it. Is there a way to do that?

Hope some of you experienced Mac guys can help.

 

[bearxor]

1. How are you connecting to the NAS? Samba or NFS? Samba is slower, but it shouldn't be horribly slow. Do you have any 802.11b clients connecting to your AP and slowing your wifi access down? Try a wired connection?

2. This, with the seeming network problems above, just make me think something with your wifi is just funky. Try everything wired and get it working and then pull things off to wireless one at a time and see how your performance gets affected.

4. MacFUSE - http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
NTFS-3G - http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

 

[oynaz]

Thanks for the reply. My Windows boxes use the wifi without a hitch, but they are off now. Still might be the wifi, I suppose. I will try wired.
I cannot remember if I use Samba or NFS. How to tell? The "More Info" is anything but informative.
Can you recommend MACFuse or NTFS-3G over the other?

Just thought of 2 more questions

5. I have mapped three network drives, which all show up on the desktop. That is fine, but on starup, all three are opened in Finder, and I have to close them. How do I stop this?

6. How do I uninstall an app?

 

[bearxor]

It's been a while since I've looked at NTFS on a Mac. MacFUSE used to be required to install NTFS-3G (ie: NTFS-3G is a plug-in for MacFUSE) but it looks like the NTFS-3G installer includes MacFUSE now, so you can just download NTFS-3G and it will install MacFUSE for you.

how do you connect to the share? smb:// or nfs://? Your NAS will have to support nfs before you can connect that way, but it's usually much faster than samba.

Otherwise, it just sounds like crappy network speeds. Trying it wired is the only thing I can think of.

5. Apple -> System Preferences -> Accounts then choose your user login and the Login Items' tab. Click the check boxes in the Hide column. I'm not sure if this works or not, but it's the only thing I can think of. If it doesn't work, you can close them all quickly by holding the Option key on the keyboard when you click the close button. It will close all windows of that type at one time.

6. Delete it. Just open the Applications folder and delete it. If you want to be thorough, you can open Finder and look at your Application Support folder under your user account and delete any files it creates but those are usually simply preference and settings file, nothing very large or important. AppTrap will try and clean up all the extra files and stuff. It does a pretty decent job. Sometimes a Application will have it's own uninstaller.

http://onnati.net/apptrap/

 

[oynaz]

OK, I use Samba. It seems like the NAS can actually use NFS, but the procedure seems quite fishy to me. I will wait for a firmware upgrade.

Speed is not problem - I easily hit 2 MB/s. I will still try it wired. Wifi can act strange sometimes.

5. Those check boxes have absolutely no effect - they work on the iTunes helper though. Annoying. I sense a bug - or is it just me?

6. Oooo, shiny. And so much easier than the windows way.

 

[suklee]

6. I've used the free AppCleaner with good results.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

There's an easier way to enable NTFS writing in Snow Leopard.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376

 

[KeypoX]

There's an easier way to enable NTFS writing in Snow Leopard.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376

This is experimental, and known to be unstable, use at your own risk.

Very Very unstable. Really nothing has been stable in snow leopard for NTFS write support. I wouldnt try it from that link. People have success with ntfs 3g and other paid solutions it seems. I gave up on it. Maybe ill try ntfs 3g again. But it was nightmare when i enabled that "experimental, native" support.

also copying 30GB over that slow of a connection, you said 2MB would take a long time. About 4 hours 10 min. I dont know much about itunes, dont like it to much, but it copies all your mp3s and stores them in its own cryptic way.

EDIT: Forgot to add many people have lost all their NTFS files with the experimental, native.

 

[TheStu]

NTFS-3G is great for a free solution, gets the job done admirably (the only thing I do not do, at all, with any solution, is create NTFS partitions on my Mac) but it halves your drive read/write speeds. That is just the cost of the free solution.

Paragon NTFS is a paid solution, and does not limit your drive speeds, but it is fairly pricey at $30-40 (I can't recall which).

AppCleaner is great, highly recommend it.

 

[KeypoX]

I use app zapper is that not good? It makes a cool zap sound

 

[TheStu]

I use app zapper is that not good? It makes a cool zap sound

AppZapper is great, and early on was one of the only solutions out there which is how they got away with charging for it. Since then many good free solutions have come up.

Sort of like with Xslimmer (which I bought), when the intel Macs first came out, if you wanted to save space by stripping languages and PPC code out of your applications, it was the best game in town. Monolingual did the same job, but had problems. Since then, I have no idea what the free apps are like because I bought a lifetime license for Xslimmer ($12).

 

[oynaz]

Ah, iTunes copies all music to the local disc at default. Don't do that (clickyty-click) - there.

Looks better now, but still very slow, even on the LAN.

No luck with either the printer or MACFuse. MACFuse installs fine, but I cannot write to the disc. Do I have to do something in particular to make it work?

 

[oynaz]

iTunes is not my friend. Appearantly, my problems iTunes where caused by .m3u playlists, which caused it to hang when added on a network drive. I am not impressed.

 

[KeypoX]

iTunes is not my friend. Appearantly, my problems iTunes where caused by .m3u playlists, which caused it to hang when added on a network drive. I am not impressed.

itunes sucks man, you gotta play by its rules lol.

 

[bearxor]

Ah, iTunes copies all music to the local disc at default. Don't do that (clickyty-click) - there.

Looks better now, but still very slow, even on the LAN.

No luck with either the printer or MACFuse. MACFuse installs fine, but I cannot write to the disc. Do I have to do something in particular to make it work?

Did you install NTFS-3G?