PC to Mac

[bubba gump]

I have had a PC for a few years now, but I'm thinking of changing and getting a Mac, but I have lots of files/pictures and my itunes library that I really don't want to loose.
I was thinking of getting an external hard drive and transferring everything over that way, but I just wanted to ask if there was an easier or better way of doing it before I went ahead and bought it all.
Thanks in advance....

[Gromit]

If you have an iPod, read this

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1329?viewlocale= en_US&locale=en_GB

or this

http://guides.macrumors.com/Copying_Music_from _your_old_PC_to_new_Mac

[ChuckFickens]

Do you have a broadband router with more than one Ethernet port (i.e. it has a built in network hub) if so you could just plug both computers into it and with a minimal amount of setup transfer the files across the network directly between the computers.

[fo3nix]

Buy the external hard drive. It'll come in useful.

Copy all your stuff onto the drive.

Once your new Mac is ready, connect the drive and transfer your files across (there are specific places for this stuff -- each user has a Pictures folder, Music folder, etc.). But you're better just opening iPhoto and dragging your photos into that (automatically put in the correct directory), and the same with your music and iTunes.

Once you're sure that your music and everything else is all nicely on your Mac as well as your old PC, go into /Applications/Utilities/Disk utility.app.

With this, click your external drive on the left, and choose the 'erase' tab to erase the drive and reformat as one big 'HFS+' drive.

Once done, (you may need to disconnect and reconnect the drive), a message will pop up asking if you want to use Time Machine with this drive. Choose yes, and your entire system will be backed up to this external drive, and then changes will be backed up every hour.

That way, you now have a very good backup of all your stuff.

[bubba gump]

Thanks Guys

Just wanted to ask fo3nix, is there any hard drives that you would recommend, I don't want to spend to much on it and also do all hard drives work with both pc's and macs.

[fo3nix]

Hard drives usually connect with either USB or Firewire. Both are compatible with PC and Mac.

However, you format the drive with a certain filesystem. Windows uses its own filesystem, and Macs use their own.

FAT32, an older system, can be read by all systems. So it's best to format with this to copy stuff from one machine to another. (So format to this on Windows before copying your stuff onto it.)

Time Machine uses some advanced stuff that FAT32 can't do though (multiple hard links, essentially), so you have to use HFS+ for that, which makes it only work on a Mac. (Though you can get some programs to make it readable on Windows too.)

As for drives: don't shop at PC World or the like if you can help it. ebuyer.com and amazon.co.uk are great, and you'll get a better deal. Seagate, Western Digital (WD), Maxtor, LaCie are all good brands. Just go for what you can afford, with the largest size possible. Right now the good price/capacity point is around the 500GB mark.

Whatever drive, since it's going to be used for backup, try and make sure it has a lot more capacity than the Mac's internal drive. If the Mac comes with 250GB, then a 500GB will be very useful.