Switching to a Mac? Good on ya. Let me suggest that you buy three things to make your purchase complete:
- A multi-button mouse
- More RAM (bringing your total to at least 512MB)
- A subscription to MacFixIt.com.
- Okay, a fourth thing: this post by Derek Miller
MacFixIt is invaluable, full of daily troubleshooting news and hints, along with a forum where helpful Mac owners will try to guide you out of whatever glitch you’re stuck in. And the site’s founder, Ted Landau, regularly contributes essays and tutorials that are worth the yearly subscription price on their own.
Case in point: today’s Ten ways to stay out of trouble:
1. Back up. Back up often.
Sure…you’ve heard it before: It‚Äôs important to back up. But it bears repeating. No matter what problem you have, you can avert complete disaster by having your files backed up. The death of a hard drive that has not been backed up is the computer equivalent to having your house burn down. A lifetime of treasured documents could be lost forever. But with a computer, you have a huge advantage as compared to your house: For very little money, you can maintain a duplicate of the contents of your drive. If your hard drive dies, nothing of value is lost at all. To accomplish this feat, all you need to do is make sure you have a recent backup of your data. That‚Äôs why backing up is at the top of my list.
How and exactly what you back up can vary as a matter of personal preference. You can use the Finder to just save the important files in your Home directory. Or you can use any one of a number of utilities (such as SuperDuper or Data Backup) to make a bootable clone of your entire drive. Or anything in between. It depends upon exactly what you feel is critical to save, and how much time you are willing to invest in doing it. Just make sure you do it. Personally, I maintain a copy of my entire drive on a separate external FireWire drive. In addition, I periodically burn critical data to a CD.
There’s a lot more: how to install updates without trashing your system, when to use “Save As” to avoid document corruption, why you read warnings before clicking “OK”… a lot of it basic, but all of it critical. It’s required reading before you power up; he should be writing Apple’s manuals.
Thanks for the tips. I’ve taken two new jobs that will require me to spend substantial periods of time dealing with Macintoys Macintoshes and it would behoove me to learn to wring the most out of the beasts instead of griping about mushy keyboards, single-button mice without wheels, and a user interface that assumes that you have never used a computer despite it being 2005, not 1985. Landau’s post was pretty basic, but it was aimed at the non-technical users which Macs are rumoured to attract. Derek’s goodie bag, on the other hand, is one that I’ll be bookmarking and revisiting as I teach the Mac to like me.
I’ve been good at avoiding Macs for two reasons — first, they’re overpriced and underpowered, and second, the first 15 years of Macs were those of closed-architecture boxes running a proprietary operating system that ran certain applications well and little else. I enjoy getting into the guts of my computers and learning a bit about how they work. By the time I really needed to do noise and pictures, Wintel boxes (hate the OS, like the hardware options) had caught up; for general use and networking, GNU/Linux does the job while being free in every sense of the word. (The score between proprietary software and free software has been evened for office applications; OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta is powerful and straightforward; as long as this sucker stays around, I have no need to use Microsoft’s products.) Having said that, I’ve been less openly hostile towards Macs since OS X, which was based on a superb OS.
(Apple cultists give me the creeps; would they really prefer the original Apple vision, where one company controlled hardware, its OS, most of the software, and a lot of peripherals? Microsoft’s bad enough.)