Advice pc to mac

BringTheRain

BringTheRain

BringTheRain

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First of no trolls or fan boys please

I didn't want to make this thread but struggling to find info I want.

What are the MAIN differences between os's. I hear u have one click Mouses?

Does msn, mozzila work?

Hotmail I take it still works?

What is the equivalent to ms offfice. More so excel and word?

Is there like snow leopard pro or something?

Even if someone can point me in the right direction to a site. That would be cool

My google skills are not EPIC

Thanks
 
DAMO RAM80 said:
First of no trolls or fan boys please

I didn't want to make this thread but struggling to find info I want.

What are the MAIN differences between os's. I hear u have one click Mouses?

Does msn, mozzila work?

Hotmail I take it still works?

What is the equivalent to ms offfice. More so excel and word?

Is there like snow leopard pro or something?

Even if someone can point me in the right direction to a site. That would be cool

My google skills are not EPIC

Thanks
Click to expand...

1) Mouse - Can use most mice, im using an MS one at the moment. Forget the 1-button misconception.

2) Firefox, MSN and Hotmail. No probs

3) MS Office is avaiable for Mac, whats its like in comparison, I dont know.

4) Theres Snow Leopard and Snow Leapord Server

5) http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/
 
http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/

to start with

What are the MAIN differences between os's. I hear u have one click Mouses?

Well no we have multitouch devices that enables much more than just clicks, however "right click" as you would say would be two fingers, or on a mouse simply a right click.

Does msn, mozzila work?

Of course though i wouldn't use the microsoft client personally, Adium rocks.

Mozilla, yes all(?) mozilla applications are built for osx, but most prefer safari and mail on mac.

Hotmail I take it still works?

What do you mean by works, as in you can access the internet and a browser to check a webmail client then yes.

What is the equivalent to ms offfice. More so excel and word?

Excel and Word for mac devoloped by microsoft. Or iWork.

Is there like snow leopard pro or something?

There is a server edition but no, there are no different packages for general use.

Can I also add that this isn't sucky google skills but sheer lazyness and the information is so easy to find.

Still, I hope I helped.
 
Thanks for the input and links. Only been on apple site today. Looks at minis for the gf.

I did search google. But it just came up with random rubbish on how to transfer files from pc to Mac
 
Random fact: Microsoft Word was available on Apple computers before Windows computers :)
 
Having just made the switch, I can report that it's been fairly straight forward (after my faulty device experience) the way you install things is slightly different, but I'm starting to get more comfortable with the os now I'm using it.
Ms office 2008 isn't as good as the 2007 pc version, but I've heard good things about 2011 - there's a free upgrade offer on that at the moment. I've also installed parallels to allow me to run a virtual win7 machine for apps that I have that don't port if I want.
Also try here for info http://www.myfirstmac.com/index.php/
 
DAMO RAM80 said:
I'm thinking of a Mac mini to start off with? That's gotta be a good move?
Click to expand...

I think it's a good idea to buy something used rather than new. That way you can sell it for similar money if you decide you don't get on with it. Last year I bought a nearly new MBP 13 in the full knowledge that it would sell for about the same price if I hated it.

...which I don't :)
 
I regularly use Office 2003 at work on Windows. I also have Office 2007 on my MBP. I'll be honest... I hate using it on the MBP. It doesn't feel as well integrated although I can't explain why. It's still the best office package though.
 
I assume you mean Office 2008 mate rather than 2007 in a Virtual Windows environment?

Office 2008 on the Mac was weak unfortunately. Entourage makes me feel stabby.

Office 2011 on the Mac though is a different story - great platform.

Maybe not quite up to Office 2010 levels, but it ain't far off.
 
DAMO RAM80 said:
First of no trolls or fan boys please

I didn't want to make this thread but struggling to find info I want.

What are the MAIN differences between os's. I hear u have one click Mouses?

Does msn, mozzila work?

Hotmail I take it still works?

What is the equivalent to ms offfice. More so excel and word?

Is there like snow leopard pro or something?

Even if someone can point me in the right direction to a site. That would be cool

My google skills are not EPIC

Thanks
Click to expand...

1 click mice: It's easy to enable right click in system settings for MBP trackpad or iMac mouse.

MSN & Mozilla: Work fine. MSN messenger has a native client that I much prefer over the Windows client. Less bloat and crap built into it. Camino is a native OS X client built on Gecko, Mozillas rendering engine.

Hotmail works fine in all browsers.

iWork would be the office equivalent. I haven't used it or MS Office on OS X so can't comment on them.

The only other version of Snow Leopard as far as I'm aware is server. But I'm told different versions of install discs work on different pieces of hardware. Such as an iMac install disc will only work with an iMac, not a MBP. I don't know how true this is though, not tested it myself.


I switched a few months back and I'm really happy with the decision. Of course OSX has it's quirks over Windows, but then all OS's have their individual quirks and it's just a matter of getting used to the way things are done. Taking the time to getting used to the OS is the main point though. Many people proclaim "X doesn't work the way I want it to, I'm going back to Y!" without giving it a chance.
 
DAMO RAM80 said:
I'm thinking of a Mac mini to start off with? That's gotta be a good move?
Click to expand...

The current one is very expensive for what you get, to the extent that the base level iMac is much better value.

You'd be better getting a second hand one from last time round - they'll be a fair bit cheaper.
 
OSX and Win 7 are very similar now.

Win 7 too a lot of ideas from OSX and incorporated it well. I have a Win 7 desktop and a MBP running snow leopard, personally I prefer OSX now as I also have a ubuntu server and *nix based things work nicely together.

Generally I find OSX to be simplified (some people like this, others want the same level of control as they are used to with windows). With time you get used to this and if you want to be hardcore then go and work through terminal.

Terminal is one of the things probably most people ignore, worth learning how to use it though as it adds a new dimension to OSX beyond the simply interface. Obviously it is rock stable and assuming you have not added any dodgy/poorly coded random apps you will see no major slowdown and the sleep function work wonderfully.

Try one out for a week and see if you like it. Usually it can take longer than that to get used to the way the OS works... but will give you an idea if you hate it or not.

What exactly do you wish to run on it?

Productivity provide by iworks is average to poor compared to Office. Office 2008 (Excel especially) is more powerful, but much slower. I have heard Office 2011 should improve the performance significantly.

General web browsing is easy and you will find an application to do the equivalent to Windows easily.
 
vonhelmet said:
The current one is very expensive for what you get, to the extent that the base level iMac is much better value.

You'd be better getting a second hand one from last time round - they'll be a fair bit cheaper.
Click to expand...

I agree it is expensive but it is also a pleasure to use as I related in another thread i.e. used my neighbours new mini. Yes you could get a base iMac for not much more especially if you spec up the Mini and throw in the Mac keyboard and mouse. The one problem with the base iMac is the itsy bitsy 21" screen. When I put my 21.5" iMac against the 24" screen I use for W7 it seems like I have acres more screen to look at. In reality it's only 2 1/2 inches and yet it looks much more.
 
OSX is Unix derived, but now differs considerably from the likes of *BSD. Playing around with it feels a bit like a version of linux where someone else has customised it strangely and unpredictably. I'm not sure how common it is to look for a terminal when first meeting an Apple computer though.

As such it benefits from a rather better security reputation from windows, though surely worse than Unix themselves. Tremendous effort is expended to make the user experience as painless as possible, it "just works" (though apparently the kernel panics occasionally and tells you to reboot the computer anyway, so this isn't quite true).
The number of users is increasing and so security through obscurity becomes less effective. Further, making the end user experience steadily easier is likely to conflict with security. As such, I believe windows and osx are going to end up basically the same from this perspective, albeit approaching from opposite sides. Quite a lot of windows users are scared of viruses now, and quite a lot of mac users assume they're immune from anything nasty online. It's hard to say which is worse.

Learning to use new software isn't so bad, safari and firefox work much the same way. I'm unsure how ms office compares to the apple version, or what quality the osx port of ms office is. Certainly I wouldn't consider this a reason not to try osx if you're sick of windows.

Of course, there's always Ubuntu instead.
 
JonJ678 said:
As such it benefits from a rather better security reputation from windows, though surely worse than Unix themselves. Tremendous effort is expended to make the user experience as painless as possible, it "just works" (though apparently the kernel panics occasionally and tells you to reboot the computer anyway, so this isn't quite true).
Click to expand...

Just to say that I've used Macs for 18 months now and the only time one has "crashed" was when I had to do a hard reset upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which was nothing out of the ordinary with that upgrade. I've not seen a single kernel panic.
 
29bfwy1.jpg

I've no idea how frequently this happens, or the "spinning beach ball of death". That they exist at all interferes with the "just works" premise though. I'm not by any stretch condemning Apple's OS as unstable relative to Microsoft, or relative to Ubuntu for that matter.

That it doesn't always "just work" seems relevant to the OP.
 
JonJ678 said:
29bfwy1.jpg

I've no idea how frequently this happens, or the "spinning beach ball of death". That they exist at all interferes with the "just works" premise though. I'm not by any stretch condemning Apple's OS as unstable relative to Microsoft, or relative to Ubuntu for that matter.

That it doesn't always "just work" seems relevant to the OP.
Click to expand...

I got this once when I plugged a T-mobile internet dongle into my macbook pro. But then that crashed a windows pc once too.
 
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