Tips for Switching from Windows to Apple: How to Perform Common Tasks on Your New Computer

With more and more people switching to Macintosh every day, it's essential to know how to get around on a Mac. These tips will highlight the most important functions.

In the past few years, Apple's market share has increased at an astonishing rate as more and more students, businesspeople, and technology gurus flock to the iPod, the Powerbook, and the iMac. Even those who do not own an Apple computer may find themselves needing to understand the basics of the operating system when Macs replace Windows computers in offices, schools, and cybercafés. The following tips will get the casual user quicky acclimated to Mac OS X and ready to perform everyday functions.

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Working with Windows

Not the operating system! The physical windows on an Apple computer have similar properties to those in Windows, but they work slightly differently. In the upper left hand corner, you’ll see three buttons. The red button is the Windows “X,” but there’s a difference – clicking this button will close the window, but not the entire application. To close the application, type Command + Q, go to Quit in the application menu at the top of the screen (the Safari menu, for example), or Ctrl + click the application in the Dock and click Quit. If a program freezes up or is slow to close, use “Force Quit.”

The yellow button is the minimize button. If you use this button, a small icon representing that window will appear on the right-hand side of the dock. Minimize is less necessary than on a Windows machine, however, because you can see all the windows on your screen by dragging your mouse to the Hot Corner you’ve set up, or by using the keyboard shortcut you’ve selected.

The green button is a “maximize” button, but this won’t make the window fit the screen; instead, it will cycle between predetermined optimal sizes. To make the window the size you want, drag the lower right hand corner of the window. To move the window on the screen, grab the top of the window and drag it.

Using the Dock

The Dock is where your most frequently used programs, and anything that’s open at the moment, lives. Since clicking the red button doesn’t actually quit the application, it’s helpful to glance down at the Dock to see what programs are open at the moment. On Leopard, a small light blue dot below the icon indicates an open program, and on Tiger it’s a little arrow.

You can drag any application to the Dock from Finder, or keep it there by right-clicking the open application’s icon in the Dock and selecting “Keep in Dock.” You can select “Remove from Dock” or simply drag the icon off the Dock to remove it.

Using Finder and Spotlight

One frustrating thing for a Windows user using Mac for the first time is the question, “where is everything?” Because the Mac operating systems are all about getting rid of clutter, most of your files and programs are organized in an application called Finder, rather than in a Start menu.

Finder is the blue square smiling face in the Dock, and it will never go away or accidentally get deleted. By default, Finder has a few obvious folders like:

• Music
• Downloads
• Documents
• Applications

You can create a new folder or subfolder by typing Shift + Command + N. If you’re using the Leopard OS, you can drag these main folders into the Dock to use something called “Stacks.” When you go to a Stacks folder in the Dock, all the files in that folder pop out and are easy to find.

Another easy way to find anything on your computer, especially if you don’t remember what folder it’s in, is to use Spotlight, the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Click on it and type what you’re looking for to search your whole computer. It’s much faster than Windows’ search feature. You can also use the Spotlight search bar in System Preferences (the Mac version of Control Panel) to figure out how to change preferences on your computer.

Software Update

Finally, it’s good to know how your new computer updates itself. Mac doesn’t use Service Packs – it has something called Software Update instead, which updates all the Apple programs on your computer. You’ll find it in the Apple menu (the Apple icon at the upper left of the screen).

You can set it to look for updates at a given interval, and click “Details” to find out what you’re updating when it pops up. In Tiger, you can use your computer while updates install. In Leopard, the install and restart processes are combined, but the process is much.

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