10 Essential Points to Remember Before You Switch to Mac from Windows

Seriously, why on earth would you switch to Macintosh when Windows offers enough to accommodate your skills. Not one but there can be a hundred reasons to switch to Mac OS X. For instance, Mac is a system of choice for advertising agencies. If you aspire to be on the creative desk, learning Mac usage is certain. Mac scores high when it comes to creative graphic design and web development. Adding to the party,  to my knowledge there are no known viruses released for Mac OS X. That implies you have a system free of viruses, adware, malware or worms to work with. There are more than 115,000 Windows viruses. Don’t get me wrong I’m not a Steve Jobs devotee. But you need to look straight.

Although, Windows and Mac almost have a similar looking user interface, that doesn’t mean the switchers can take Mac head on. The beginners have to cope with the subtle difference. Since there are far less Mac users than Windows users you would rarely find friends who can help you out with this OS. So I decided to re-educate you with some handy tips that would allow you to outlive the common difference between the daily use of Windows XP and Mac. Here are my Top 10 Tips to make your Mac use easier.

1. Task Bar

That’s one the first things you look at when you open Windows. In Mac equivalent for the Task Bar is Dock. It ensembles the icons of programs you use most often. Quite similar to Windows, if you want to place a program in the Dock, just drag the icon of the program there. It’s even easier to remove the icon. Simply drag it off the Dock and its gone into air.

2. Start Menu

This is probably the most important part of your Mac-education. Unlike the Windows you’ll find no Start Menu on a Mac. Well that’s not a kick, all that you could perform from from Start Menu can be done using the Apple menu at the upper left of the Mac screen and the Dock.

3. Menu Bar

Each of the Programs in Windows comes with a Menu bar. Contrary to this the Programs in Mac show a single menu bar at the top of the screen. It changes as you switch from one program to other.

4. Control Panel

This is where you have the controls in Windows. In Mac, it is System Preferences does the Control Panel. You can launch it either from the Dock or Apple menu.

5. Keyboard shortcuts

Mac has some similar keyboard shortcuts like Windows. For instance you use Ctrl+S for Save, Ctrl+P for Print and several others shortcuts in Windows. In Mac you do the same but instead of the Control Key you have to use Command key (it has a cloverlike symbol). To save a file in Mac you need to use Command+S.

6. Quiting Program

In Windows you can quit a program by clicking the X in a circle on the right top corner. In Mac, its the same X in the circle on the upper left corner, but clicking it only closes the window and not the program. In order to quit the program you select the Quit options from the leftmost menu. For a shortcut, you can press both the command and Q keys together.

7. Right Click

Quite similar to Windows, the Mac has a right-click menu function. This right clicking options is available in all modern Mac systems. In case you are using a Mac laptop you just get a single button on track pad. However, you can generate a right-click by holding the Command key while clicking. Alternately, you can place two fingers on the track pad while clicking.

8. Maximize Windows

In Windows XP you have a blue square button to maximize the Window. In Leopard you have the green circle at the upper left that can increase the small Windows size to the optimal for the contents. This may not cover the whole screen always.

9. Screen

In windows you can simply change the Wallpaper and Screen Saver by right clicking on the Desktop and selecting the properties. To set the desktop picture and screen saver on a Mac you have the option called Desktop & Screen Saver in the System Preference.
You can also set the Screen resolution from Displays System Preference.

10. Switching Programs

To switch between windows of the running programs you use the Alt and Tab combination in Windows XP. The icons of the programs are displayed in an array and you can choose the one you want to open. In Mac you can do the same by pressing the Command key and the Tab key together. Well given this Mac also offers a cool feature called Expose. It shows every open Window at once. You can watch the miniature form of Windows, you can navigate among them. The easiest way to trigger Expose is to either hit the F9 key or the dedicated Expose key.

These are just a few tricks, for further information on Switching to mack you can loo into Switch 101.

Wait! still if you are interested in using Windows Vista, Apple offers you BootCamp for free so that you can partition your hard drive and install Vista on part of it.