Sunday, October 26, 2008

Living with the Dell mini 9 and Apple's iDisk

This is another quick note about living with Dell's new netbook...

CREDIT: Dell

I'm storing most of my files off-board in the Cloud using Jungle Disk and Amazon S3. But since it's been around longer and I've got a bunch of files on it, at least for now, I also needed to mount my Apple iDisk. While there is the iDisk Utility for Windows XP from Apple it grates that you have to use a seperate bit of software for something like this. Fortunately you don't actually need it...

Like a lot of seemingly proprietary bits and pieces from Apple, the iDisk isn't, it's basically just a simple WebDAV share, and Windows has built-in support for that. All you need to do to connect to your iDisk is go to My Computer and click on Tools > Map Network Drive and enter \\idisk.mac.com\username in the pop-up and select an unused drive letter. Enter the username and password when asked. Your iDisk should now show up as a network disk in Windows Explorer.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Allan - glad to hear your enjoying living with your Dell min9. They're very cool, but I'm going to stick with my MacBook for now!

    Just a thought relating to iDisk and online storage solutions. Have you given Dropbox a try? It is quite simply the best cross platform storage service I've ever tried. It sealessly integrates into Windows, Mac OSX and the web for storage access anywhere. See - https://www.getdropbox.com

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  2. I'm just about to to delivery of a new Macbook to replace my, not that old really, Black Macbook. As far as I'm concerned the new laptops are the nicest thing that Apple has come up with since the 12-inch Powerbook.

    That said, I'm enjoying the Dell mini. The hardware is pretty nice, and since I'm more or less using it as a desktop to drop web applications onto, I'm not getting as frustrated my MS Windows as I usually do...

    I've considered using Dropbox but decided that Jungle Disk would be the better way to go, simple because they're using S3 as a backend. I'm not sure I trust my files to some startup's backend code.

    The Dropbox interface however, does look pretty spiffy. I'm also getting frustrated by the apparently slow sync speeds, and the lack of information about what's happening, between different JungleDisk mounts when I'm copying files between computers.

    Still considering blowing Windows away and installing OSX onto the Dell mini though...

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