new os x user questions (sorry)

1. how to take off the search on the pane in finder? i can remove the sub menus but not the actual "search for"

2. how do i know if i calibrated my dell 27" ultrahsarp monitor correctly?
3. how can i hide folders that windows normally would not dispaly ex: reycle $ bin on my external hard drive or thumbs.db in my video folder

4. how come searching my external hard drive is very slow and does produce any results? i thought spotlight was supposed to be epic

5. why does my bookmarks bar say 41, when its empty?

6. my external hard drive is recongized as a ipod/cd- not external disk how can i change this? also i cant write on it, i could in windows...

so far i love my new last mac book pro 2.5ghz , VERY Difficult to get use to leopard for me i shall post more question here if i have any. thanks!

 

Unfortunately, I don't think you can. Finder can be a real PITA sometimes. Lets hope things improve with the rewritten Cocoa Finder.

Well, you can delete it or rename the file with a ".", eg "thumbs.db" to ".thumbs.db", but you have to do this in terminal and windows will most likely not be able to use the file after you rename it like this. Either ignore them, or delete them.

Maybe others will answer the rest of your questions. I currently don't have an external hard drive to play around with so I'm not sure why spotlight is slow searching.

 

noooo just realized ntfs does not work with osx (write wise) how will i edit video larger than 7 gb ... any way around this?

 

I think there are some 3rd party app's that will allow you to read write to NTFS, otherwise you can format you external to Mac OS extended and then Get Macdrive for your pc... this way you can read.write to the mac drive on your pc.

To remove search in the finder window go to customize under view, then just drag the search bar off until it disappears in a puff of smoke
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There is a program to use NTFC on mac-give me a second and I ll give you the name.

thats bc you are used to windows-give it a week or 2 and you ll be fine

 

i figured out most of problems ... i use macfuse and 3g ntfs to get m external fully compataible , im loving this so far. just need to learn the little thing shortcut for new folders, renaming, and moving faster throughout finder

 

time to change the sig

 

From the desktop, go to Finder in the menu bar, choose "Preferences", under the "General" tab uncheck anything that you don't want to show up on the desktop.
If you are big into navigating through the Finder then make sure that you unveil the Path Bar. Open a Finder window from the Finder icon in the Dock, from the menu bar choose "View" and select "Show Path Bar". Now at the bottom of every Finder window will have a path to every folder you open.

Don't worry about the learning curve, you'll have it down in under a week tops. You have to drop your Windows way of thinking and it will all make sense. Remember the Mac OS is not a new system, it hit the streets before Windows so you will see similarities (for obvious reasons) so it should make it easier for you to learn.

 

Just a note on ntfs-g and macfuse, is that the transfer rate of files is slower. So it wont be as fast as if it was a hfs/fat partition.

Not sure how paragon ntfs is on speed compared to ntfs-g.

 

I was going to point you in the direction of MacFUSE but you found it already. Great piece of software, btw.

 

all my data was deleted. i think i must have deleted the ntfs file and or macfuse. wow. trying to recover with stellar phoniex trial, my external hard drive only shows up on disk utility now