[New Englander]

Originally Posted by bopat

The Mac and the PC need to see the correct formatting on the thumb drive to be able to use it. I'm guessing when you erased it you formatted it with a format that was incompatible with your Windows PC.

To fix it, just put the thumb drive in your Mac and erase it with GPT partitioning and exFat formatting, then the drive will work on both your Mac and your PC.

I'm only going to use it on the Mac from now on. I hope I didn't break it. It's a 64 Gig.

I'm going to replace the battery on the PC and sell it. it's a HP 15"- Core I7- 16 Gigs of Ram- HD display-Solid State HD. In great condition.

[BrianL99]

Originally Posted by New Englander

I'm only going to use it on the Mac from now on. I hope I didn't break it. It's a 64 Gig.

... t's a HP 15"- Core I7- 16 Gigs of Ram- HD

Ahhh ... now I know why you ordered your MacBook Air with 16 Gigs. Probably not necessary with Mac OS, but certainly doesn't hurt.

[bopat]

Originally Posted by New Englander

I'm only going to use it on the Mac from now on. I hope I didn't break it. It's a 64 Gig.

I'm going to replace the battery on the PC and sell it. it's a HP 15"- Core I7- 16 Gigs of Ram- HD display-Solid State HD. In great condition.

Nah, it’s ok, but it’s probably formatted with APFS now, that only works on a Mac, and it’s the best filesystem for the Mac.

[FredMitchell]

Try putting the USB Flash drive (thumb drive) back in the mac. Select the drive on Finder. Then Empty Trash. Eject the drive on the Mac before unplugging the drive. Then try it on your windows machine.

Consider using Dropbox for storing all of your "data" files, not program files. Then you can access those files from all of your computers. Also, you won't lose them if your computer is destroyed or replaced. It also synchronizes files, so after you change a file on one machine, the other will eventually have a copy of the new file. Dropbox works on any system you are likely to have - Mac, Windows, and even Linux (which you are unlikely to have or want).

There are alternatives to Dropbox, which stores the files on a "cloud server". Amazon, Google Drive and likely others.

Some USB Flash drives come formatted for PCs and do not support large files - likely if you are trying to store "movies". They can be reformatted to a larger file system on a Mac. Google can help you find out how to do this. Do it BEFORE putting files on it, because files will be lost after reformatting the drive.

[wsachs]

Originally Posted by New Englander

I admit I'm not great on computers. So I'm asking for help. On this Windows PC I had downloaded a program from Amazon. What I'm trying to do is copy this program onto a thumb drive. Then place the thumb drive into a new Macbook. But, when I plug the thumb drive into my pc a bell sounds so I know the PC is recognizing the thumb drive but I can't find it.

Last night the thumb drive worked great. I copied my bookmarks from my PC to the new Macbook. Then I erased the thumb drive so I could do the same with the program I want to move from my PC to the new Macbook.

Any help will be appreciated.

If you erased he thumb drive you probably erased the file system too. You need to reformat the drive so that both PC and Mac can read it. "Attach the drive to your Mac.
Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility).
Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar.
Click Erase.
From the Format menu, select ExFAT.
From the Scheme menu, select Master Boot Record.
Click Erase and follow prompts to confirm."

[midiwiz]

Originally Posted by New Englander

I admit I'm not great on computers. So I'm asking for help. On this Windows PC I had downloaded a program from Amazon. What I'm trying to do is copy this program onto a thumb drive. Then place the thumb drive into a new Macbook. But, when I plug the thumb drive into my pc a bell sounds so I know the PC is recognizing the thumb drive but I can't find it.

Last night the thumb drive worked great. I copied my bookmarks from my PC to the new Macbook. Then I erased the thumb drive so I could do the same with the program I want to move from my PC to the new Macbook.

Any help will be appreciated.

First off Windows and MAC are not compatible, even with the emulation software on MAC you will have software that will not work.

Bookmarks don't really transfer because in Win10 they are registry keys not actual bookmarks. There is freeware out there that MAY convert them but I have yet to find one that truely works 100% perfect.

Lastly the drive formats are different between Windows and MAC.

Basically nothing will work the exact way you intend, you should have asked about this prior to getting that MAC.

Sorry.

[BrianL99]

Originally Posted by midiwiz

Bookmarks don't really transfer because in Win10 they are registry keys not actual bookmarks. There is freeware out there that MAY convert them but I have yet to find one that truely works 100% perfect.

.

Just open up iCloud for Windows, follow the prompts and all your bookmarks will be seamlessly shared across platforms. No "freeware" needed. Easy peazy, lemon squeezy.

[Indydealmaker]

Originally Posted by New Englander

I was able to use the thumb drive on my PC and copy all my bookmarks, then put the thumb drive into my Mac and it worked fine. So, I erased the bookmarks from my thumb drive. Now when I put the thumb drive into the PC a bell chimes to let me know it recognizes the thumb drive "but I can't find the thumb drive to transfer items from the PC to Mac.

I'm sure I'm not explaining this very well.

Try reformatting the thumb drive.

[New Englander]

Originally Posted by BrianL99

Ahhh ... now I know why you ordered your MacBook Air with 16 Gigs. Probably not necessary with Mac OS, but certainly doesn't hurt.

The PC has 16Gigs. The Mac has 24Gigs. Computers love RAM!

[New Englander]

Originally Posted by FredMitchell

Try putting the USB Flash drive (thumb drive) back in the mac. Select the drive on Finder. Then Empty Trash. Eject the drive on the Mac before unplugging the drive. Then try it on your windows machine.

Consider using Dropbox for storing all of your "data" files, not program files. Then you can access those files from all of your computers. Also, you won't lose them if your computer is destroyed or replaced. It also synchronizes files, so after you change a file on one machine, the other will eventually have a copy of the new file. Dropbox works on any system you are likely to have - Mac, Windows, and even Linux (which you are unlikely to have or want).

There are alternatives to Dropbox, which stores the files on a "cloud server". Amazon, Google Drive and likely others.

Some USB Flash drives come formatted for PCs and do not support large files - likely if you are trying to store "movies". They can be reformatted to a larger file system on a Mac. Google can help you find out how to do this. Do it BEFORE putting files on it, because files will be lost after reformatting the drive.

Good info. Thanks

[New Englander]

Originally Posted by midiwiz

First off Windows and MAC are not compatible, even with the emulation software on MAC you will have software that will not work.

Bookmarks don't really transfer because in Win10 they are registry keys not actual bookmarks. There is freeware out there that MAY convert them but I have yet to find one that truely works 100% perfect.

Lastly the drive formats are different between Windows and MAC.

Basically nothing will work the exact way you intend, you should have asked about this prior to getting that MAC.

Sorry.

Found that out the hard way.

[BrianL99]

Originally Posted by New Englander

The PC has 16Gigs. The Mac has 24Gigs. Computers love RAM!

As I said before, it was difficult for me to order one with 16G. I believe that MacOS handles memory much differently than Windows, but you're right ... computers love RAM. I've never seen a Mac with 24G, but now I know they exist.

I started with a Mac that had 128K and the Disk Drive was 400K. McPaint & McWrite ran perfectly fine and 400K seemed like more disk memory than anyone could ever use.

[midiwiz]

Originally Posted by BrianL99

Just open up iCloud for Windows, follow the prompts and all your bookmarks will be seamlessly shared across platforms. No "freeware" needed. Easy peazy, lemon squeezy.

its not 100% been there done that

[New Englander]

Originally Posted by BrianL99

As I said before, it was difficult for me to order one with 16G. I believe that MacOS handles memory much differently than Windows, but you're right ... computers love RAM. I've never seen a Mac with 24G, but now I know they exist.

I started with a Mac that had 128K and the Disk Drive was 400K. McPaint & McWrite ran perfectly fine and 400K seemed like more disk memory than anyone could ever use.

I got the Mac from Amazon. On PCs, you can add RAM later if you want, but on Macs, you can never increase the RAM because it is soldered into the machine. Buying a Mac with more RAM than necessary helps increase its longevity.