Jan 21 2010
Room to Go
Little on the outside, big on the inside: the Seagate FreeAgent Go 640GB (that’s 671,088,640MB) drive is currently on sale for about $110 at Best Buy (regularly priced from $129-$145 at other sources). Available in Ruby Red and Tuxedo Black. Other capacities are also available, from 250GB-1TB. The drives are petite — only 5.125″x3.125″x.4375″.
- Seagate FreeAgent Go 640GB USB 2.0 drive
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I wanted to test Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro I use for public demos and classes, and didn’t want to munge the drive irreversibly. So I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive onto the Seagate drive, then ran the Snow Leopard install on the Seagate — it’s a bootable drive. So far, all the necessities (applications, printer drivers, scanner driver) seem to work fine.
Consider this my public confession that I am not a bleeding-edge adopter of a new operating system: I used to be more intrepid, but I didn’t want to take chances with my demo machine. Carbon Copy Cloner is great for this, and it also provides an incremental backup feature. CCC is donation-ware: if you like it, you can donate to the developer. I guarantee that you’ll like it, and I encourage you to generously support Mike Bombich and other developers who contribute so much to the software ecosystem.
Note: while the Seagate drive can be used on Mac or PC, Carbon Copy Cloner is Mac-only.
That’s one sexy drive and I’ve been meaning to clone my laptop for a while now. I religiously use Time Machine, but if my laptop craps out on me, this could be a major stress reducer.
Thanks for the tips, Mistress of the Mac!
I’ve not gotten Adobe Media Encoder CS4 to work for me since I “upgraded” to Snow Leopard. It crashes on launch every time. Sounds like you got everything working. Any ideas? (I tried deleting the prefs but that didn’t help) I should have tried it your way.
And Fireworks feels like it’s from another planet… cute Seagate drive, BTW.
I miss System 7.
I’m assuming you reamed out permissions with Disk Utility, but if not, try that voodoo.
I Googled the issue, and apparently you’re not alone. One suggestion was to turn off “Preview While Encoding” in preferences, but if you can’t get it to launch, that’s no help. Did you recently allow the Acrobat 8.2 update? That seems to be causing problems for CS3/3 apps, but perhaps it poisons CS 4 as well. See:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/534/cpsid_53468.html
Yes, there’s something to be said for System 7. Move the files and they just work.
None of your suggestions worked for me. The CS3 Flash Encoder works but I want to use the CS4 version that has more options. Sorry to sidetrack your post with this issue but you made me think when you said your software worked. The difference is that I used Migration Assistant to move my files to a new laptop instead of CCC. I’ll keep my eyes and ears out for a solution. Let me know if you hear of any. Thanks.
So I deleted a file named com.Adobe.Adobe Media Encoder.4.0.plist and it launched. Now let’s see if it works.