Just got a macbook couple noob questions :S

I read through the switching guide, it was helpful. I recently made the sitch from PC to mac, and so far im lovin it.

I have 2 probably simply questions that I cannot find a solution to.

1. I cannot unzip compressed folders, it tries to open them with quicktime, do macs come with a unzipping program?

2. I have a seagate freeagent external harddrive. when i plug it in i can view and move folders form it onto my mac normally, but when i try to move a folder from my mac onto the external hd it doesnt go. It says folder Im trying to move into cannot be modified.

thx

 

1. What compression format (.zip, .rar, .tar, etc.? See OS X Software List (Freeware). Look under Compression Tools.

2. Your external hard drive is most likely formatted as NTFS. As you have experienced, Mac OS X can only read NTFS, not write. I believe you can use Disk Utility to erase/reformat the external hard drive. Choose OS X Extended (Journaled) HFS+ for the best Mac compatibility. If you're also using the external hard drive with Windows computers, they will not be able to read or write HFS+. In that case you have several options. A) Leave the external drive NTFS and use MacDrive or an alternative application. MacDrive will enable Mac OS X to both read and write NTFS. B) Reformat the external drive as FAT32. Both Windows and Mac OS X can read and write. However FAT32 is limited to less than 4GB file sizes. C) Something I didn't think of .

 

Are there no freeware alternatives to MacDrive? Yes, im a cheap ba$tard.

 

There is a utility called MacFuse, but I haven't tried it yet.

 

MacFUSE is pretty much the opposite of MacDrive. With MacFUSE and NTFS-3g, you're in OSX and trying to write to NTFS. With MacDrive, you're in Windows and trying to read from and write to HFS.

As for file compression, there's stuffit expander, the unarchiver, unrarx, RAR, etc. I personally found RAR to be the best, but it's command-line only.