Mounting Time Capsule drive - total newbie question

Question

I'm a total Mac newbiew, so please bear with me.
There are alot of threads in this forum that talk about 'manually mounting' a time capsule drive. What is this manual mounting, what's the point of doing it, and how do you do it?
My Time Capsule shows up under the Shared menu in Finder and I can access it from there. Is access to the disk via this link slower than mounting it or something?
Lastly, my TC is connected to my Mac Mini via an ethernet cable. How can I check that the Mac is talking to the TC disk via this connection rather than over the wireless network that the TC is providing?

Answer 1

By "mounting" people are meaning seeing the Time Machine disk icon actually showing on the desktop. I can only think of 2 reasons for this, 1) time saving if people use the disk for other purposes as well as Time Machine and need to access it regularly, and 2) If it mounts, it proves you have connectivity.
Doing it from the finder sidebar is effectively the same thing, only you are doing it instead of getting the system to do it. Your initial access to the drive may be noticeably slower for a couple of seconds until it mounts is all, nothing worth worrying about
See here for more info if you are interested in mounting it automatically:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1446928
As for your last question, unless your wireless and wired connection talk to different networks, then turn off your wireless and used the wired connection.