With it being the start of the New Year and all that I have decided to clear out the office a little bit and throw things out that frankly I am never going to need or use.  The photo below shows my current office setup, which for me at least, is working really well at the moment.

I had a drawer in the office full of cables which really needed sorting out.  There were cables in there from god knows when, probably the start of the decade.  Being very organised, I have now sorted them all out and bagged them all up using Morrisons sandwich bags.  As you can see they should be a whole lot easier to find now.

So my Office setup for the new year works like this.  The focal point is the Apple 24 inch LED Cinema display.  This is connected to my Apple MacBook Pro 13inch Intel Core 2 Due 2.53Ghz machine through the mini display port.  The two work seamlessly together basically turning the MacBook into an iMac (with the help of my Apple wireless keyboard and mouse) with added advantages being that the MacBook is still a portable computer and also that I have  dual display when working with the cinema display.  This comes in very handy when watching iPlayer or Sky TV whilst at work.

Behind my display I have an external hard drive (500gb) which is connected to my Apple Time Capsule (also 500Gb).  The Time Capsule backs up the MacBook which is superb and it does this without me knowing and I can therefore be sure that my data is safe.  It is very reassuring every day when I come in and switch on the MacBook and immediately the little Time Machine sign starts spinning letting me know that the days hard work is being backed up.

It always feels better to start the year with a good clear out to start a fresh.  I can now find all the things that I want to, but I wonder how long it will stay like that!

Some of you will know that I recently sold my Mac Mini in order to raise funds for a more modern MacBook computer.  Before doing this I used the Time Machine facility to make an entire copy of the files on my Mac so that I would have them for restoration when I get the new Mac.  But I have some questions which, after scouring the Internet I am yet to find the answers to.  Perhaps someone here can help?

The things is, is that although I want to restore my old files from the Mac Mini I don’t want to restore them all.  I mean lets face it our computers get riddled with all sorts of rubbish these days.  The more you do then the more they get cluttered and therefore I am a big fan of starting from fresh every now and then.  As far as I am aware when you switch on your new Mac it will give you the option of restoring a Mac from a Time Machine backup.  Well I sort of want to do that, but I want to simply look at the files that are backed up and then select which ones I wish to backup from.  Can this be done with Time Machine?

I suppose the other two questions that I also have are what is the easiest way of getting all of my photos from iPhoto onto my new Mac and the same with iTunes music?