Apple’s Time Capsule: Money Well Spent

MacDaily News discusses the review of Apple’s Time Capsule that was done by Walt Mossberg of Wall Street Journal. Mossberg concludes that purchase of Time Capsule is money well spent for users of Time Machine. But in reading his review, it would seem that his endorsement extends further than that. He also talks about how Time Capsule works well with Macs running Tiger, and with Windows PCs running Vista or XP.

Of course, Leopard’s Time Machine is the ideal way to run Time Capsule. Apple’s OSX Leopard’s popular feature called Time Machine automatically and continuously backs up a Mac’s hard disk without the user having to do setup. “Time Machine is a key selling point for Leopard and the Mac. It is more complete, and yet simpler, than the built-in backup feature in Vista Home Premium, the most popular home version of Windows,” Mossberg reports.

Time Capsule is a “…stand-alone networked gadget that packs both a giant hard disk and a speedy Wi-Fi wireless router into one slender case. It just plugs into your existing home network and any laptop within wireless range can connect to it. It can back up multiple computers.”_

Mossberg tested Time Capsule’s performance beyond its functionality with Time Machine. _”Time Capsule is designed to seamlessly work with Leopard’s Time Machine. But it can also be used as a wireless internet connection and/or a remote hard drive, for manually storing and retrieving files by Windows PCs running either Vista or Windows XP, or by Macs running Apple’s older Tiger operating system. And you can also use it with certain other backup programs, such as the ones built into Windows XP or Tiger,” Mossberg reports.__”In my tests, Time Capsule performed perfectly with Time Machine. It also was easily recognized by several of my Windows machines running Vista and Windows XP. On all of these machines, I was able to speedily access the Internet via Time Capsule. Time Capsule can be set up to either replace or supplement your existing Wi-Fi router,” Mossberg reports. “All the machines, even the Windows ones, also could recognize the Time Capsule as a remote hard disk, and save files to it and retrieve files from it.”_

Clearly, Mossberg is saying that the purchase price of Time Capsule is money well spent no matter what your equipment or operating system is.