> There's a Delete key, but no backspace key

Use Fn-Delete to delete characters in front of the insertion bar.

You can enable two-finger secondary click from the system prefrences panel. So as with two-finger scrolling (up/down and left/right) you can "right-click" or secondary click by placing two fingers on the touch pad and clicking the trackpad button. It becomes very intuitative after a bit.

I use both Macs & Windows PC's daily. I came from a Mac background and I just set the PC up so it worked just like my Mac did. Both OS's are versatile enough that you can use the PC like you do a Mac or the Mac like you do a PC.

The nice thing about most Mac programs is that they all use the same shortcuts for the same actions. Learn one and you can find your way around the rest.

Of course, after over 20 years of using Macs, I still don't know how to run anti-virus software on one. I would imagine it is similar to running anti-virus software on Windows. I've had lots of practice doing that.

mac is still overpriced for general use. you get more from pc, especially as a gamer.

"mac is still overpriced for general use. you get more from pc, especially as a gamer."

I would add that the PC advantage is almost ONLY on the gaming front... I use both platforms and since OS X 10.4... my PC has been relegated to strictly a gaming box. The Mac is, in my opinion, better at ever single task outside of gaming.... and the only reason the PC does better at gaming is only because MS courted the gaming industry for over a decade... and all the while made specialized gaming hooks that the developers wanted... aka DirectX

You can achieve a right-click by tapping the touch pad with two fingers. You can also scroll (in any direction) by dragging two fingers on the touch pad. But first you must enable this functionality in system preferences.

Every new Mac user should spend time looking at all the options in the system preferences. There are a lot of useful options that are off by default and you can learn a lot about the capabilities of the Mac by just going through all the preferences.

The system preferences is by default in the dock. It is the icon that has an apple logo with a light switch to the left of it. You can also launch it from the apple menu (top left corner of the screen).

After posting my response, I saw that Trini has already talked about right clicking with two fingers. But there is a slight difference. Trini talks about placing two fingers on the touch pad and then clicking the touch pad button. I find it easier to just tap with two fingers (no need to press the touch pad button). But both ways work.

Also, some people have told me they don't like the two-finger-scrolling functionality because they don't like to twist their hand to align their two fingers in the direction (or perpendicular to the direction) they want to scroll.

Your fingers do NOT have to be aligned in any direction. The touch pad just needs to detect two fingers and it figures out in what direction they are both moving. The fingers don't have to be close to each other either (you can even use one finger from each hand if you wish). And if you use more than two fingers, it won't work.

Work bought me a MacBook Pro maxed out with 3GB of RAM and the 200GB hard disk and it is one sweet machine. I use Parallels and run Windows XP, Vista and Ubuntu linux virtual machines all running on the dual-core 64bit intel processor of the MBP, (faster than on my Dell PC) intermingled with all of my best-of-breed Mac OS X applications. OS X is effectively running as a robust, malware-resistant Unix hypervisor for whatever virtualised OSes I wish to run with full copy and paste and drag and drop between XP and the Mac.

If (or should I say when) any of my Windows VMs die, I simply copy a new VM image over and everything is back in running order again. Of course I also have the ability to run all the thousands of Unix and Linux apps out there natively (as OS X is BSD Unix with X11 and integrated Linux APIs).

I used Parallels Transporter to import an image of my entire Dell PC with all of our Windows-only corporate apps, Zenworks and Novel scripts and was up and running without any re-installs with little more than a few mouse-clicks. I also dual-boot Vista using Bootcamp which turns the Mac into a 100% Vista PC and with the built-in ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video card it is no slouch in the Windows games department either in fact.

It's great for testing compatibility of every important OS and browser version out there. As they say - "One system to rule them all" Very powerful.

-Mart

Congratulations. Now that you are using your Mac just remember this mantra:

There are only Macs --
& things that are NotMacs.

Then instead of a complex change-over you can think of yourself as having moved to a higher plane of existence.

"Congratulations. Now that you are using your Mac just remember this mantra:

There are only Macs --
& things that are NotMacs.

Then instead of a complex change-over you can think of yourself as having moved to a higher plane of existence."

Stop making commercial for Mac!

As if Mac is better then everything on the planet. PC and Mac IS different, that is a fact. Mac IS much better than PC in certin things like Adobe programs and such.
PC is developing alot and is better than Mac in many ways THAT IS A FACT. And you can´t say that PC is the best or Mac is the best and all else sucks, becouse they are made for different purposes.

Ok now Tom, calm down!

well someone said something about macs being overpriced. that was a misconception that i had for the longest time. I had a laptop PC. priced out that was going to cost me close to 4000 dollars. i picked up my Macbook Pro decked out. for around 3000.. I was a mac basher most of my life, building my first computer long before i was in jr. high. But now that i made the switch couldnt be much happier.
One thing though as far as Adobe programs running better. actualy is a little wrong. Because if you have a new Intel Mac, like i do.. Adobe CS2 runs pretty slow and slugishly on the intel based macs, as it was designed for the Powerpc.... BUT luckily and thankfully they came out with Adobe CS3 wich runs blazingly fast on my new laptop, i was very sad at first but now am very happy. bought it the first day it came out, more than worth it...
if you can try and get the education discount i got one as a teacher. man saved sooo much money..

"The next episode of "Can A PC Guy Become a Mac Guy?" will be a review of Mac OS X 10.4. In this case, it will be OS X 10.4.9, the upgrade that just came out"

Is that still in the pipeline? I'm interested to read about your experience, as I switched (back) over to Mac about the same time that you did.

Pico --

Yes, it's about 1/3 written. I've been real busy with work that actually pays, so I've had to neglect some of the writing here.

I am a currently a Windows man - I do a reasonable amount of sound recording / engineering and work on my desktop at home. I am looking to purchase a laptop for various reasons - two have come to me after some research: 1) The new Dell Inspiron and 2) The MacBook Pro 15". Anyone with some reasoning / help?

This has been extremely helpful, thanks!

I've been a windows user since 1994 (or Win 3.11) and have been considering switching for some years now -- the current projection is early in 2008.

After some thought I decided that the decisive issue in saying 'yes' to a MacBookPro is not the OS (as it can run all of them now) but the differences in the hardware that I would be 'stuck with' by opting a Mac notebook.

I'd really would not want to use an external pointing device. But what if I then decide that I'm better of running linux or -ehm- XP... would I be handicapped with a single button touchpad? (why doesn't apple just split the thing in two and assign them the same function by default, allowing advanced users to reassign it?)

Or the del key. I rarely use delete but I backspace all the time -almost unconsciously. So I'd rather have a backspace button that could then be escaped to a del function rather than one that would require me to use two fingers. Also the absence of direct page-up page-down keys is annoying. It is not as if the didn't have the space!

On the whole, the pros out-weigh the cons. But I'm bothered with the idea of having to adapt to the absence of certain features that seem to be missing for historical rather than practical reasons.

I am not all for the ideal of giving my money to microsoft but macs just have no software no support and yes if you just want to check your emails then buy a over price piece of junk, over the years I have upgraded my pc over and over and still and still save a crap load of money then buying a mac, and yes mac's have issues, I use to work for a mac based company and you never guess all the issues macs have, one guy there had a issue with every mac he bought but that just hardware, the software issues are far worst and have even made people lose data over the years, but again who cares they are really only good for checking your email, I do so much more then any mac person does on his mac, the whole boot camp thing is a great ideal but still far off from being perfect, I would like to see a better version of mac running on a normal, anyway remember keep buying those crappy mac computers for the high prices and I will keep buying my cheap pc that dance around a mac, of course I am not rich so I don't want to give apple a crap load of money for something I can check my email with.

It is funny though...Now Macs are basically PCs. What's the point in learning a different way to do things when a Mac's insides are the same as a PC. The whole advantage before was that alot of what drove PC w/software, Mac used the CPU to do.

I used to dream of buying a sick Mac, now I will just build a sick f*cking PC for cheaper.

*BTW* My point was that the author is a little too late in "jumping ship"