Switching to Mac - Helpful Tips & Suggestions Requested

Well, after my experience with the iPhone, I became interested in a Mac. After doing some research, I decided to make the switch. My new 15" MBP with iWork and MobileMe should be arriving Monday or Tuesday (I was really hoping it would arrive by this Friday to give me the weekend to play with my new toy, but no such luck).
Anyway, I was looking for tips and suggestions for a Mac newbie (and laptop newbie) as well.
The machine is purely for personal use: some light gaming (though I may just keep my XP box for this), email/internet, personal finance, iTunes, research/writing for informal presentations to small groups, and Bible study (Logos developing a Mac version of their software was the final deciding factor).
Any suggestions/tips/recommendations on helpful books, websites, software and accessories would be much appreciated. Specifically, I would appreciate some feedback on personal finance software, research/note-taking software, and docking stations/KVM switches. Also, anything I need to be aware of as I transfer my iTunes library to the laptop and setting it up as my primary iTunes machine.

Hi
Glad the link was useful, and I can completely understand with the books.
No I have not used anything else of this type, I stumbled on notebook first of all and did not feel the need to look for anything else.
Notebook is really good for keeping all the notes for a project in one place. You can keep various types of media (written notes, web page clippings, recordings, pictures etc...) in one notebook, and organise them in several different ways. You can have various different notebooks open at the same time.
The feature I like best is the ability to make an audio recording of say a lecture, interview, meeting, even TV programme and keep notes at the same time which are then linked to the point in the recording when they where made.
Then later you can look at your notes and jump into the recording to hear the relevant part of the recording to those particular notes.
So you can have an accurate record of what went on as well as a written record of your thoughts at the time and both are link chronologically.
You can also add in additional notes when you play back the recording later which is handy in case you miss something first time round.
Notebook uses the internal mic and does all this from inside the app, so you don't need anything else.
I find it is just a really handy app to have around.
Thanks for the star by the way.
Paul
Message was edited by: scalawag
Message was edited by: scalawag

Similar Messages

I'm new to Macbook Pro, and never imagined I would have problems saving bookmarks when I switched to Mac. Any suggestions with this issue? And has Apple come up with a permanent fix?

I'm new to Macbook Pro, and never imagined I would have problems saving bookmarks when I switched to Mac. Any suggestions with this issue? I have Safari 6.0.4, and has Apple come up with a permanent fix?

Triple-click the line below to select it:
~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Show Info
from the contextual menu.* An Info dialog should open.
Does the dialog show "You can read and write" in the Sharing & Permissions section?
In the General section, is the box labeled Locked checked?
What is the Modified date?
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C). Open a TextEdit window and paste into it (command-V). Select the line you just pasted and continue as above.

1st used ipod with pc, now, want to switch to mac, help!

I first used my mini ipod with my windows desktop computer. I recently purchased an apple notebook and wish to use my ipod with it, and not with my PC. However, because my ipod is formatted for windows, I cannot use it for my mac.
I've been searching through the forums for help on how I can achieve this goal of switching to the mac, but with no luck. Is there any way that I can reformat my ipod to a mac? (easy explanations please!) Thanks!

The really easy way to do this is to plug your ipod into the new (mac) machine, and once you see your ipod show up on the desktop/ itunes dock, go look for the program called "ipod updater." This program will prompt you to reset your ipod and reformat it to mac, and you will follow the steps of setting up you ipod as when you first acquired it. The downside to this is that you will loose all the files on your ipod. There are two things you can do if you want to transfer the music onto your new machine. 1) Go get the CDs and upload them onto itunes on your new mac or 2) go consult google to find a third party program that will allow you to take the files off your ipod and put them onto your new mac. To my knowledge, apple doesn't provide a method of doing this so you have to download another program.
If you decide to recover your ipod, that is use a third party program to get the songs off of it, then wait until that process is complete and then use ipod updater to reset your pod to your new mac. With your ipod still plugged in, go into itunes, rename your ipod, and let itunes automatically update your ipod. After that you can set it to manual again (you may have to unplug it first). I do not reccomend using a third party program to maintain large music libraries on both computers, you should choose one that will be your home computer and stick with it.

Might be switching to mac...help!

hello everyone, i just joined the discussions...i gotta say its awesome to see theres a big community of mac users that help each other...my congratulations for that, seriously.
i joined mainly because ive made up my mind in a 90% to buy an Mac Mini CoreSolo,80GB,512RAM,SuperDrive next week, that would be my first mac ever, after lots of years using pc's.
But i do have certain doubts about using a mini for some tasks, even though i already know multiple formats are compatible(phew!)
im not exactly an expert in computers, sorry if i ask silly stuff(or too many questions):
-does mac support torrent using/downloading?
-are there any mac-compatible p2p programs for downloading movies and music(such as eMule, morpheus, etc)?
-is mac compatible with any pc or emulated games? (winning eleven 9 is the one that im interested in)
-are there any mac based video players that support subtitles? if so, do they support .srt and .sub files?
-if i transfer my .doc files and .ppt files, will i be able to see them just like they were on windows? no strange symbols?
those are my questions... an answer for them would complete my decision of switching to MAC.
thanks everyone
V.

Does mac support torrent using/downloading?
Yes, of course. There are a few bit torrent clients for apple
Are there any mac-compatible p2p programs for downloading movies and music(such as eMule, morpheus, etc)?
Yup again, There is limewire and others.
Is mac compatible with any pc or emulated games? (winning eleven 9 is the one that im interested in)
Many games have mac version (World of warcraft, Doom 3, Quake 4 etc. although i'm not sure about winning eleven 9). But get this (Drumrolls...):
With the new technology "Bootcamp" (A beta program for mac) you can run Windows XP (Without any restrictions) on a intel mac (Such as the solo)! At very fast speeds too!
Check it out here:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
Bootcamp allows you to create a Windows Partition so you can run windows XP exactly as you would on a PC without any set backs or speed decreases. All it takes is holding one key (once xp is installed) to boot of the windows section of your mac.
Are there any mac based video players that support subtitles? if so, do they support .srt and .sub files?
I'm not 100% about this one, but you can download realplayer, quicktime, divx player and windows media player all for mac. I'm nearly 100% sure you can find a mac program to open those file types. Plus, if you can't find any media players for OSX you can use bootcamp and run the files in XP.
If i transfer my .doc files and .ppt files, will i be able to see them just like they were on windows? no strange symbols?
Once again, I'm not sure about this one (I don't even own a mac yet-Used to have a G3 (old mac), planning to also get a solo and did all the research you can possibly do about them, and my freind has one- Why i know so much).
With that being said there is Windows Office for Mac which i'm pretty sure lets you open .doc files and .ppt files without any restrictions or weird symbols. In fact, the office version on a mac is much better then the one on PC (Freind has it).
Once again if there is a restriction (Which i'm pretty sure there isn't), you can always bootup in XP and open the files there.
With that being said Applworks and iWork (The mac versions of office) are soooo much better so i don't think you'll be using office much once you get a customed to them anyways.
Hope that helps,
Great to here your making the switch,
I have yet to hear someone be dissapointed by switching to mac,
Good luck- keep asking questions i had a bunch before- now i'm helping answer other's questions,
Wannabe.

TS3649 I have just bought and updated my Mac operating system to 10.8.2, also updating iPhoto (as my mac suggested/requested)... now I dont have the option to share my iPhoto books to idvd... why? what can i do to rectify this?

I have just bought and updated my Mac operating system to 10.8.2, also updating iPhoto (as my mac suggested/requested)... now I dont have the option to share my iPhoto books to idvd... why? what can i do to rectify this?

now I dont have the option to share my iPhoto books to idvd... why? what can i do to rectify this?
Purchase iLife 11 (includes iDVD) ON DISK.
IDVD is a wonderful piece of software and well worth the low cost of $40.
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MC623Z-A-iLife-VERSION/dp/B003XKRZES/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U
http://dealmac.com/lw/artclick.html?1,527850,1872219

My new MacBook Air froze up and does boot up, I am new to mac, any help or suggestions would be greatly appriciated

My new MacBook Air froze up and does boot up, I am new to mac, any help or suggestions would be greatly appriciated

How new?

Where can I send an email to iTunes so that they can resend me my purchased items? I just got a new laptop (switched from a PC to a Mac) help would be appreciated.

Where can I send an email to iTunes so that they can resend me my purchased items? I just got a new laptop (switched from a PC to a Mac) help would be appreciated.

Email itunes support! Or you could just transfer your purchases. Either w/ external drive, or w/ you iphone/ipod/ipad!

Considering Switching to Mac - Data on File Server - HELP!

Hi-
I'm a Windows-on-the-desktop user with a whole bunch of iOS devices and I am thinking of switching to Mac as of Lion / Lion Server. I tried the Mac a few years ago and got frustrated pretty quickly because of the inability of multiple users to share data on a server. Can anyone please tell me if now is the time to try again!?
My needs:
iPhoto - Have a Photos share on a server (windows/mac/linux) which contains all of our family photos (raid6) as the source of 3 desktop Mac iPhoto Libraries. Automatic updating? Faces recgonition turned off? (server grinding at 400GB of photos), syncing libraries among desktop clients? Can Aperture do this? (last time I tried Aperture, it wanted to rebuild the library every week.... and that took days of grinding my server)
iTunes - Have a Music share on the server as the source of 3 different iTunes libraries. Automatic updating? I'm in Canada so iTunes Match will never come here.
iMovie - native editing of AVCHD yet ? (no desire to convert my whole library to massive uncompressed video files)
Video - Play AVIs / WMVs / MKVs full screen via a Mac Mini from a Video share on the server to a HD Television. Can Quicktime do this? FrontRow? Last time I tried I recall a lot of stutter.
Many thanks-
A Mac-Wanna-Be

So I've got a solution to iPhoto: Use Picasa. Not ideal, as I would really like to live the iLife, but it'll do for now. I've found a bunch of iPhoto library syncing utilities, but none of them deal with shared raw data on a network drive - they all expect you to carry all of your photos on your desktop / notebook Macs.

Windows User Switching to Mac – System Install/Setup Help

Hi All,
I’m a (very) long time windows user switching to Mac. I know nothing about Mac’s as in zero zip (I’ve been messing with an iMac for 2 weeks.) Buying a MacBook Pro (spec’s at bottom). I do creative work audio/video/graphics and use a lot of nonstandard peripherals e.g. audio interfaces, RAID, drawing tablets etc. Getting a new system setup is a long and laborious process.
When I get a new computer here’s my normal process:
Step 1
I reinstall windows to get rid of the junk software that’s always added by third parties.
Update all hardware drivers & software (OS and Auxiliary app’s)
Tweak Windows OS for my needs
Make full system backup
Step 2
Install all my major app’s e.g. adobe creative suite, audio programs etc.
Install non-standard peripherals such as audio interfaces, RAIDs etc.
Make full system backup
Step 3
Open up all major app’s and customize e.g. set preferences etc.
Set-up and test app specific peripherals, tweak as necessary
Make full system backup
Step 4
Install virus software and unimportant apps/hardware. No backup.
Is this basically what I should do with the mac? What kind of issues might I expect? Are there steps or issues I’m worrying about that don’t apply to the Mac? Finally, is there an equivalent to the windows Blue Screen of Death? Does the system every get so jammed up that a complete wipe out and re-install of OS and software is required?
I know these are very open questions so I’m only looking for general information.
Thanks
Here’s the machine I’m going to buy:
15” MacBook Pro (Late 2013) | 2.3GHz i7 Quad | 512GB PCIe-Based SSD | 16GB Ram - GeForce GT 750M (2GB)

Just to clarify the Mac includes anti-virus software and updates with no additional software purchase required?
Yes. Unlike Windows OS X was designed from its inception to be a secure multiuser operating system incorporating many protections specifically intended to isolate one user's space from another. Each succeeding release has only added more protections, and Apple updates its virus / malware database regularly.
Third party "anti-virus" products abound, but none of them improve upon anything OS X already includes. Most of them are simply worthless junk. Some will only cause problems, while others are arguably malicious. No one knows more about Macs and how to protect them than the company that builds them.
Apple is the most famously secretive company since E-Systems, yet the vast majority of Mac related problems reported on this site are the direct result of using ill-conceived products from third party developers claiming unique knowledge of OS X's inner workings. The companies selling them are desperate to assert their continued relevance in a market that is seeing rapid contraction of Windows PCs in favor of iPads - and to a lesser extent, Macs - that have never had the need for their products. Many AV vendors have been reduced to sordid scare tactics as they see their market and revenue stream diminish. Unfortunately, scare tactics work, resulting in widespread misery among Mac users gullible enough to swallow them. That represents a threat all to itself.
If it were not for Windows' predilection for malicious alteration from viruses and malware we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Even though I’m doing some heavy lifting e.g. video editing, audio recording (full band), large folders of music files/video clips/animations etc. no system/drive maintenance is required by me or if it is the software to do so is already included?
Correct. As a professional you may not be satisfied with the bundled apps such as iMovie but Apple has professional video and audio recording apps as well. Even they are not very expensive. You can find out more about them in the Professional Applications forum.
A Mac needs no third party maintenance utilities. Like "anti-virus" products most of them are worthless also.
Time Capsule: I thought that was Apples hardware for backup, remote access, streaming etc.
Yes. The Time Capsule is Apple's combination wireless router and backup device. You can just as easily use any inexpensive hard disk to use in conjunction with Time Machine.
Time Machine is Apple's backup software and it's included with OS X. You can use either one, or both. You can also use inexpensive commercial "clone" software such as Carbon Copy Cloner. Each one has its advantages, as well as their limitations. In the interest of redundancy I use all of them.
B&H Photo is a highly reputable vendor, one of the few I recommend.

What should I do if the iphoto keeps on saying that "Plz wait for import to complete" when i click the close button but it is not importing photos? How can I close the iPhoto? I try to switch my mac off but it doesn't work. Thanks.

What should I do if the iphoto keeps on saying that "Plz wait for import to complete" when i click the close button but it is not importing photos? How can I close the iPhoto? I try to switch my mac off but it doesn't work. Thanks.

You should be able to select Force Quit from the menu beneath the Apple icon in Finder
and choose to Quit iPhoto from there, without messing up the Mac OS X in the process.
OS X - Support
Not sure if rebuilding the iPhoto library would help this issue. However if you had to
turn off the computer without the correct method (unplug, etc; instead of menu choice)
the system may have accrued damages and should be checked, maybe repaired by
use of the Disk Utility in the system. Or restart the computer in Safe Boot mode, then
run 'repair disk permissions' while it is running in that reduced mode; then restart after.
•Understanding Safe Mode - tuts+ computer skills tutorial:
http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/understanding-safe-mode--mac-59897
•OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?
Suggestions on how to use Safe Mode in article, to resolve issues, may be helpful.
There likely are other means to rectify troublesome applications, including reinstall.
Be sure to backup your music, image, video, and other work on an external drive
or suitable device as a precaution against loss should there be a hard drive failure.
iPhoto - Mac Apps - Apple Support
There should be some tips and help information using iPhoto via this tiny Support link.
Good luck & happy computing!

New to Mac: help me adjust my Windows workflow to iPhoto

I recently switched to Mac, mostly in the hopes of spending less time thinking about how the computer works and more time doing what I want to do.
In fact, what made me finally start seriously thinking about a Mac is when I heard about the iPhoto '08 events feature, where it automatically split the photos based on the dates. I thought that was genius in how simple, yet effective it was.
I take quite a few photos. I take a lot of random photos of my car (I'm a car guy), but I also take some photos at parties, friend visits and family visits, etc. I often take several of photos of the same thing, because, heck, there's plenty of space on the memory card, and maybe one of the subsequent photos will be better than the first.
One common scenario for me is going to a social gathering of some kind and then posting the photos of that event online.
My Windows XP workflow used to be as follows:
1. Connect camera
2. Import photos into a folder named after the event using Windows Photo import. If several different events, select several sets and import them separately into separate folders. E.g. "My Pictures\Spring Cleaning Day Apr 2008"
3. Browse the photos using Windows File Viewer and delete any obviously poor photos and select the least blurry of several duplicates.
So that above is fairly straighforward. Now, I need to get these photos up online. A while back, I set up for myself a website that runs Gallery 1.x software, so I could just upload photos via a web interface and have them viewable with automatic thumbnails.
The thing is: I don't want to upload ALL images online. Just most of them (the best).
4. Open the photos I'm interested in a photo editor, one by one.
5. Crop, adjust levels, shadows, colors, etc.
6. Resize photo to a "large but not too large" web size, usually either 1200 or 1400 pixels wide.
7. Adjust sharpness on the resized photo to make sure it looks good when viewed at actual pixel size.
8. Save photo in a subfolder called "forweb", e.g. My Pictures\Spring Cleaning Day Apr 2008\forweb. This way, I get to keep all the originals from the camera and my resized web-ready photos separate.
9. Upload all photos from the "forweb" folder using a web interface, typing up descriptions for each.
When I'm done, I have a gallery that has thumbnails, mid-size versions of the photos (800 pixels wide, for easy viewing) and a "full-size" version for a detailed view (but not as huge as the one that came out of the camera... so it's not original size). In fact, the original size photos are huge (as I take them at 7.1MP resolution with the lowest compression), about 2-3MB each, and so I'd never want to upload a 100 3MB photos. A waste of space.
Overall, the result is pretty good: most people view the midsize photos and save full-size (1200 or 1400 pix wide) photos of things they particularly like.
However, the process is too time consuming. In particular, it takes forever to go through each photo and resize it and crop it. The process of resizing and saving each individual photo in the separate "forweb" is quite a bit of overhead. Sometimes I kind of dread having to post photos up online after events, and it should totally not be that way!
I bought a .Mac subscription after seeing the fancy web galleries. I am hoping that the combination of iPhoto and .Mac can help me get my photos up on the web quicker.
So now, the iPhoto workflow. What should it be?
Here's my guess:
1. Connect camera.
2. Import all photos, naming each event after importing.
3. Delete poor photos or blurry duplicates.
4. Identify photos I want to display on the gallery (those worth keeping) and hide all others.
5. Crop and adjust shadows/colors/etc.
6. Select "Web gallery" to share the event.
And then I'm done.
So that sounds pretty good right there. Except, I have several reservations and questions:
1. Is it better to mark photos I don't want in the web gallery as hidden (so I can just upload the entire gallery) or should I just select the photos I want to upload online into the web gallery? It seems to work either way. On one hand, it seems better to hide the photos, because then when they get synced to my iPhone, I have the most relevant photos and not the "extras." Also, if I'm showing photos from my laptop, I'm also showing the cream of the crop and not everything. On the other hand, the concept of hiding photos is kind of unusual to me. Feels strange to "hide" photos.
2. What to do for a web gallery full size that's not as huge as the original camera size? When uploading to .Mac, I only have an option of Optimized or Actual Size. Optimized size is 1024 pixels wide. That's too small for a detailed views or for wallpaper purposes. The problem is that the "Actual Size" from my camera is huge (~3000 pixels wide). I don't really want to burden people with the downloading of the 2-3MB "Actual Size."
However, it seems that it's tricky to implement such a 1200-1400-pixel-wide "full size" with iPhoto. There is no resize option within iPhoto that I could find. The best I could find was a crop with a constrain size option. I guess I would have to constrain-size crop to something like 1400x1000 first? And then crop again to get the shape I want?
Also, sharpness adjustment seems useless when adjusting 7MP photos. In my Windows workflow, I found sharpness much more useful when tweaking photos after they have been resized to this "full-size" 1200-1400 wide resolution. This again means that I'd have to do the crop "trick". It feels strange though that everything else is so straighforward, but resizing photos within iPhoto isn't.
I guess that's where the whole workflow question is. The iPhoto workflow is to keep your originals intact and maintain adjusted duplicates. But resizing is not a suggested part of this workflow--instead, it is expected that any resizing is done on the way "out" of the library (e.g. File->Export or web gallery publishing).
I wish I could introduce an intermediate "optimized" setting for Web Gallery upload (although then I don't have that precise control of sharpness after resizing).
Maybe I am overthinking this and, given that I have 10GB of storage space with .Mac, I should just give up and let it upload my 3000-pix wide 2-3MB JPG originals (i.e. use the "actual size" setting)?
3. Can anyone provide some practical uses for the "albums" setting and contrast their use vs events? I just want to get a better insight into the practical difference. It seems that albums are not very useful or rather would be rarely used, given the main categorization of all photos into events. It seems that the only use for albums would be to bring together photos across different events. For example, I could make an album of all of the photos of my car's odometer or put together my best random city shots. Maybe I just answered my own question? Still, interested into your use of albums.

ilp
Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
So now, the iPhoto workflow. What should it be?
This is pretty good:
1. Connect camera.
2. Import all photos, naming each event after importing.
3. Delete poor photos or blurry duplicates.
4. Identify photos I want to display on the gallery (those worth keeping) and hide all others.
Well I would make a small change here. There are reports of folks getting hidden photos turning up in their web galleries. So, instead I would flag the photos I want to upload and then create an ALBUM from them. (or you can just drag and drop them to an album) Also, you can add to your gallery simply by adding to the album. Or use Ratings and/or keywords, see below
5. Crop and adjust shadows/colors/etc.
6. Select "Web gallery" to share the event.
(or Album)
You cannot change the size of images that are in the Gallery. It's a flash based "movie". Those size options refer to the file size of images that you allow folks to download from the gallery.
Events are a really limited way of organising your pics. Events in the iPhoto Window correspond exactly with the Folders in the Originals Folder in the iPhoto Library package file (Right click on it in the Pictures Folder -> Show Package Contents).
You can move photos between Events, you can rename Events, edit them, create them, as long as you do it via the iPhoto Window. Check out the Info Pane (wee 'i', lower left) the name and date fields are editable. Edit a Event Name using the Info Pane, the Event Folder in iPhoto Library/Originals will also have the new name.
That's it.
Albums can be based on any criteria you can think of - and with Smart Albums this can be done automatically.
For instance, back in your work flow above, you sort the pic and hide the one's you don't want to upload. Here's another way of doing it. Rate the pics, from 1 - 5, and then
File -> New Smart Album
Rating -> Is -> 5 stars
will find your favourites. Best yet, it will update that album every time you rate new pics. You can base Smart Albums on a lot of criteria - date, rating, keyword, camera model... have a look and see the full list, and these can be combined together...
The other great plus with Albums is that, because they are virtual, a pic can be in 1, 10 or 100 albums with no wasted disk space. But if a pic is in more than one Event you're dealing with a duplicate file.
Frankly, a Event is a bucket of Pics, and Album is a coherent organisation based on any criteria you can think of.
Regards
TD

N95 Maps Program Help and Suggestions Anybody??

N95 Maps Program Help and Suggestions Anybody??
havnt updated to firmware v12 yet
Why can't I search my Address or Current Location and then save this as HOME or say my Start_Point_01?
I have managed to save my HOME as a PEOPLE LOCATION and my friends address etc and worked out
how to plan a route etc, BUT Maps GPS POSITION thinks I live 20 miles away??
I dont seem to be able to simply set my HOME or Current Location myself,
I have seen some Satelite activity but insists I live 20 miles away :/ how do I fix this,
it's realy annoying. any handy tips people??
cant upgrade firmware as need phone plugged into wall socket
at webcafe, will have to wait for firmware :/
N95-1 (8GB-MicroSD),LCG-Audio,Fring,Nimbuzz,Skype,Youtube,iPlayer,Garmin4-GPS.Googlemaps,SkyFire,ZoneTag,Gravity, Sennheiser CX-400-IIs,500-IIs,TR-120 Wireless,HD215'S.AudioTechnica ATX-M50's.BT B-Tube BT Speaker.

The least problems you'll have with miniDV cameras. About any miniDV camera will connect to a Mac via Firewire. HDD cameras are an open invitation to trouble, especially as you speak of older computers.
There are well-featured models out there now for 2-300 bucks. But watch out for cameras that connect to the computer via a dock. I had two Sony with these @#$% docking stations .... both docks broke and rendered the cameras useless for capturing. replacing the dock was nearly the price of a new cam.

Mac Help "Support Articles" won't load

After searching for a topic in Mac Help, the resulting page has two sections: "Help Topics" and "Support Articles".
When I try to access one of the Support Articles, I get this error message:
The requested resource (/kb//apps/helpviewer/index) is not available
It appears that the folder "helpviewer" containing the file "index" is unavailable. After diligent searching I can't find a folder called "helpviewer" on my computer.
Test: Disconnect the computer from the internet and open a Help topic. "Help Topics" are listed, but there are no "Support Articles". This indicates that the Support Articles are on a server somewhere, and that I can download the article list but not individual articles. It appears that either the index file is inaccessible on the server or it is failing to be downloaded to my computer.
Is the fault on my computer or on the server? And what can be done about it?

I don't think that it's either your computer's or the server's fault. This happens sometimes when the support article has been updated, deleted, or re-issued and the older (referenced) version is no longer available. I just tried it and it worked with the article I asked for, but...
I've had this happen a couple of times; when that happens, I'd suggest going to the actual Apple support site and do a search there.
Edit: The "kb" refers to k nowledge b ase articles.
Message was edited by: Barbara Daniels1

Mac Help changes to Spanish after initial screen

Hi:
I've just got my iMac back from a Spanish Apple Repair Centre and everything was reset in Spanish when they installed a new hard disc. I thought I'd switched everything back to English but I now have 2 problems:
They have set up an Administrator password but neglected to tell me what it is!
Mac Help initially appears in English but when I click any section or type anything in, the results appear in Spanish.
Can anyone help particularly with the second problem? Many thanks

I thought I'd switched everything back to English
We could all keep suggesting things to do and then you could keep telling us that you already did that, so why not tell us everything you did to get things back to your brand of English and then we can suggest what you may have left out.
Dah•veed

Should I switch to Mac? Considering the New Macbook pro 13"

Hello,
I am not a mac user and am contemplating switching to mac as I am looking forward to get a new laptop.
I am considering getting a Macbook pro 13" the basic model but I also came across a Sony Vaio 'E' series laptop. The Sony has full HD screen, 500 GB, blu ray drive and an i3 processor. The rest of the specifications are similar to the mac.
Moreover the Sony with its better specifications is a bit cheaper than the mac.
I cannot decide on whether to switch to mac or just get the Sony Vaio.
Hope you guys can help me out in making a decision.
Thank you.

Zane.a,
Welcome to Apple Discussions. I won't go into the specifics of the Sony you are looking at because specifications mean very little, what is important is the experience of using a PC and the experience of using a Mac. Many PC users tend to get hung up on computer specifications, which CPU, RAM, Graphics Card, etc.. One thing you cannot do on a PC is run OS X where with a Mac you can run both OS X and MS Windows. In fact there are several excellent solutions (Fusion, Parallels & Bootcamp) for doing so. In addition Mac's tend to have better build quality and certainly have better resale value.
Apple has some sites I would recommend you look over. One is called:
Switch 101
and the other is
Mac 101
These sites provide useful tips, information and videos.
While Windows 7 is a good OS however it still doesn't have the same experience as OS X. With Windows 7 you still have to worry about about malware including virus's and pay annual fees to keep your antivirus software up to date.
If you need support Apple has the best in the industry. Here in the US when I need help I get someone within 30 seconds on the phone that is local, isn't reading off a script and generally is knowledgeable. Over the years when I've had occasion to call my question is almost always handled on the first call. When I used to own PC's when I had to call support I dealt with someone that frequently was nice but didn't have the knowledge and I also had language barriers and had difficulty understanding. I know it was frustrating for me and must have also been frustrating for the engineer I was dealing with.
Remember specifications are just that and many times have nothing to do with the user experience. What I'd recommend is spending time with both platforms in a store and then decide for yourself which one best suits your style.
If you choose a Mac great, if you don't I hope you enjoy your Windows machine.
Regards,
Roger

Switching to Mac - Helpful Tips & Suggestions Requested

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for