Mac Switcher Tips

[mabsey]

Here are some tips switchers may find useful. Feel free to add your own.

Go through System Preferences so that you get accustomed to the Mac's settings. This includes:

- playing with the Dock, Expose and Spaces;
- going into Security and Sharing settings;
- updating your Mac with Software Update;
- choosing what not to update with Time Machine;
- making sure Date and Time is set to your region;
- selecting your.Mac options (if you've subscribed to .Mac);
- going into Accounts and setting up a new user as a admin user and then changing your own user account to Standard.

There are two main ways to install apps (the drag to the Applications folder method and the installation wizard method). To delete the former it is usually only necessary to drag the app from the Applications folder to the Trash but for the latter, running an uninstaller is usually needed unless you want things to get messy and remove lots of apps by hand. Of course, there are other uninstaller apps such as AppZapper, AppTrap, etc which will remove the .plist and other related files - switchers like these as it is close to using the Add/Remove function for Windows apps.

For the new user, as they probably won't know what they will use most, their Dock will probably contain the apps that come from Apple: e.g. Mail, Safari, iCal and the iLife (and maybe iWork) suite of apps. As the user gets to use other apps, they can drag them to the Dock for easy access. Icons such as the Apple @ icon on the Dock can be removed unless you really make use of it.

If using iWork and wanting to save as Excel or PowerPoint or Word format, you need to choose File>Export (not Save) - a question I've been asked more than once!

You can save documents as .pdfs via the File>Print option (or File>Export in iWork apps). No need for third party apps such as Adobe Acrobat.

Get an external hard drive so you can make clone back-ups with an app such as Carbon Copy Cloner or incremental back-ups with an app such as Time Machine.

Switchers and new users can get lots of handy tips by simply going to the Help section of the Mac's Menu Bar or Apple's 101 webpages: Apple - Support - Switch 101 and Apple - Support - Mac 101

[jamesmb]

My tip - stop trying to work out how things should work relative to how you used to do things in your Windoze machine. In other words, 'use the Force'! You'll be surprised how often the answer is to do the thing that is instinctively right.

[Mr. Mayor]

James I'm with you there. I remember when I was making the switch... one day I simply stopped wondering, 'well how am I going to do this with this'... and then just started using the machine... Low and behold everything simply started to work, and often times things were easier and faster to do.

[madmacmat]

I find it dazzling, nevertheless, that things that were so, retrospectively, complicated and awkward now come so natural.... ever tried lineform after fumbling with photoshop? It's like having had a long working day and now just relax, take a glass of wine and achieve happiness and relaxation additionally to Your most wanted results...
this effect is so everpresent with Macs that I am sure as many people as give it a real try will finally switch...

[Mr. Mayor]

I think a lot of people simply get fed up with troubleshooting and crashing and things just generally not working.

I have a friend that is going through the same thing at the moment. One of his hard drives was crashing... he was trying to save it... all kinds of funky things were going on...

Shortly thereafter he asked me how much MacBooks and MacBookPros were running for these days.

[madmacmat]

ouch.... You're hitting a soft spot there... my Mac Mini can't find the hard drive any more, after running Windows via Boot Camp the last time I saw a desktop... weird enogh it seems that the drive is somehow completely gone, not to be retrieved by neither install disk utilities nor when I try to boot into target mode... it's simply gone...

dammit ;-)... I'd be considerably more relaxed if I had a backup of that one... but there were no sensible data on it... I wonder why I ain't mysteriously attracted to switching now?

[Mr. Mayor]

Well mat, I suppose all computers are made knowing that they will one day, eventually break. Glad to hear at least there wasn't any critical data on that one...

[madmacmat]

Just to end the Macmini story, got mine back with a new hard drive and nothing on it, which was fine... now I'll try to use parallels instead of Boot camp since I got meself a license and I doubt I'll use it longer than anyhow necessary ;-)...

but it's good to have it there for the few software exclusively running on it...

[Mr. Mayor]

Glad to hear you got it back... sucks that you lost that data though, even if it wasn't anything important.

I've got my Time Machine backups running smooth as butter over here now. Feel much better knowing backups are being made regularly.

[madmacmat]

I hear You Mayor!

Just waiting for my 1TB WD Mybook FireWire drive to arrive... then all will be peace and wellbeing ;-)...