How do you share your computer space?

[grantsonnen]

Any suggestions for ways to expand my home computer set-up so that my wife and I can easily access our respective files/settings/programs without stepping on each other's feet? We do not have room at home for two computer stations, so space is a concern, as is $$.

We have a G4 right now that I have been using mainly for music production on the weekends and after work. I will most certainly have to increase storage space for my stuff very soon. I'm also going to have to think about portability as I set up a studio space (maybe a CD-RW but then I'll have to get two to be able to write from the studio computer which will probably/unfortunately be a junky Power Mac).

My wife is going to start working from home very soon and has a whole different set of needs. She does web design and is also going to have to run a PC environment for some of her work (She basically needs to run many programs at once and is less concerned about disk space).

So I'm thinking we'll need more RAM, as well as another hard drive (maybe external depending on if I get the CD-RW). Or is it best to just suck it up and invest in a laptop? I'd like to hear what others would do in this situation.

Thanks.

Grant

[Synchro]

one idea would be to use an external 40, 60 or 80 GB USB or firewire hard drive. it will potentially plug into both machines and seeing that you are going to be potentially moving around big media files, one of these would do great. they are very portable and easy as heck to use.

If you both have firewire that would be the way to go since you are going to be doing media files. with the firewire one you could actually edit media files in real time, the bus is easily fast enough. i have one right now that i use to backup all my files at work as well as move mp3s between my house and office.

[fedkin]

You can just set up your Mac at home with different user log-ins and that should save settings and allow you to keep your files and programs separate. If your wife plans on running Virtual PC, make sure you have enough memory. I've had many error messages and crashes with it, and have to continually change memory allocation.

I think a portable external hard drive would serve you just fine. Iomega just came out with Peerless, which I think is an excellent idea, especially for music storage and transporting large amounts of data (comes in 10 and 20 Gigabyte disk/drive sizes). Disks are removable, so you could use one for backup and one for programs, MP3 files, etc. I can't completely tell from the pictures I've seen online, but I think it might even be smaller than a Zip drive.