About two weeks ago, Alexa's parents were ready to take the Mac plunge. Of course, I offered my help. We decided the 20" iMac was the right fit for them. My brothers in law that are still at home both now have laptops, one of them is a MacBook.
They have had a string of hard drive failures and have almost lost their pictures a couple of times, so I suggested they get a USB hard drive for Time Machine backups.
They also wanted to put the computer in a more central location, but didn't want all the clutter of having the printer hooked up to it. I suggested that they should also get a wireless print server so they could hide the printer. Their Linksys Wireless-B router was getting a bit dated as well, and I like WRT54GL's, so we were going to get one of those.
All said and done, we were looking at about $350 in accessories. I suggested that we waited until after Steve Jobs' keynote to order. I figured there may be some iMac upgrades coming. Now I look like a genius because they announced Timecapsule. It's cheaper and less of a pain in the butt than what I was looking to set up for them.
We ordered a Timecapsule and an iMac last night. There's no ETA on Timecapsule yet. I can't wait till it arrives so that I can see how well it works. If it's as good as it seems, I think every multi-mac household should have one.
Of course, Timecapsule backups don't stop you from losing everything in a fire or theft. I think we're going to set up a smugmug account to get all their pictures 'off site' as well.
