iMAC - WOW!

Congratulations [you smug git].

Does it have a hard drive that hardly ever stops rattling away like mad even when you're doing nothing, like my Vista PC does?

In my experience from the very first to my current imac they have all been virtually silent.

They are incredible bits of kit for most users and run near silent. Fits my needs perfectly.

Peter

My drive is virtually silent.

John, welcome to the bright side! The iMac (current and earlier) is a great machine. My 24" has run flawlessly from day 1 and is just so easy to use.

I'm enjoying computing, which is a first!
Mrs. 555 has been trying to convince me to get a Mac for years.

Lots of little tricks to learn as well, for instance put your cursor over any text and press ctrl, apple and D

Apple and tab for quick open application access.

Plug a camera in for iphoto. PLug a digi cam in for imovie.

Does it take the hairs off your legs in one go?

It will give you a brazilian as well.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
Lots of little tricks to learn as well, for instance put your cursor over any text and press ctrl, apple and D

Apple and tab for quick open application access.

Plug a camera in for iphoto. PLug a digi cam in for imovie.

cool , any more little tricks

For those coming from pc, try to remember that most everything on a mac is drag and drop. For instance a link in a forum can be dragged to the tab bar of safari for it to load. Or drag it to the dock to look at later. Or drag it to a folder as an archive

The layer of OSX that you see, the GUI is based in part of PDF. This means most everything can be PDFed. For instance take this thread, goto file and print then in the bottom left save as PDF. The thread will be saved as a PDF file you can then put somewhere safe (I can assure you I have never done this) but it can be useful for online transactions etc.

Other drag features. For instance if you have multiple tabs opens, drag one out to put it in its own screen.

In mail attachments can be dragged to the desktop or where ever else you want them. Remember that harddrives and folders are spring loaded hold a file on it for it to bounce open.

Hold shift whilst minimising a window

apple is ? key?

Command..

For ease of access certain areas can hold icons. In find open a window, the side bar on the left can hold anything you drag into it such as frequently used folders. These are then present when opening and saving in applications.

Also you can put icons in the top of finder windows. I put utilities here simply drag them into the top of the window and hold for a second then they will stick.

Select text edit application and press space bar to read its icon. Apparently if you can see a PC on your network its icon appears as an old CRt with the blue screen of death on. snigger.

Screen grab is appleshift an 3, and selected screen apple, shift and 4

apple, alt, cntrl and 8 inverts the screen for some reason.

555 - I had a PC for 10 years - it never worked properly - had an iMAC for 6 months - touch the proverbial it's been just great.

Fender (Strat)

I run Vista native on my mac mini (no parallels) and it works great! Smallest PC on the market. Freaks my friends out when they sit down to the Mac and Vista comes up!!!

Use Mac for everything else though...

Thanks very much for the tips Garyi.
If you have time could you please tell me ...
What virus/spyware SW would you recommend to use with my iMac?
Apart from the firewall that comes with Safari should I use anything else?

Cheers - John

I don't have a recommendation for AV software. I have never used any on a mac since I started using them at the top of the 90s.

As with PC steer very clear of norton. Otherwise you are on your own

quote:

Otherwise you are on your own

My Mac computing was going so well, but now I'm scared!

P.S. thanks Gary

Seriously I would not bother just yet. When something finally gets released targeting macs it will be all over the web like, because smug shits like me say we don't have AV software, that would be when to instal imo.

If you work a terrific amount with PCs, i.e. get attachments from one pc to your mac which you consequently send to another PC, well, if you really give a toss you could put AV on to scan them files so you don't pass infection on. Personally I don't give a toss because PC users must have AV software so it should be caught their end.

ClamAv is free, so thats one I suppose.

I've purchased an iMac and Macbook in the last year and have found both excellent machines. I'm now surprised that more people don't own Macs.

I guess it's a mix of cost, & unfounded concerns for availability of SW.
That's what put me off Mac, but now I regret my years of stressful PC computing!

I've had my Intel 17" iMac for over 2 and a half years now and it has been a joy to use. However, I do know (from bitter experience), that even a Mac is only as good as its hard disc, and I don't think I'm going to be able to get much more than another 6 months' reliable use out of mine. Therefore, in the short-term, I need to think about a back-up solution (!!), but in the next few months I'll be likely looking for a new Mac. It'll probably be back to laptops for me, especially as the new aluminium ones look so good!

JonR a reasonably cheap backup solution is a USB or Firewire external drive eg a Seagate Freeagent and a copy of Superduper to create a full bootable copy of the main drive. If you pay for Superduper it will run the backups on a schedule and only transfer the data that has changed.

If the main drive fails you can then boot from the external drive and also use the external drive to format your replacement internal drive and then Superduper your back up disk to the new main drive.

That sounds neat, Derek - I'll look into that. Cheers.