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Doesn't really impact the credibility. I can go to my local Fry's in San Diego and still get the first edition Mac mini at a lower cost to clear inventory. Plus he stated he got it at a local reseller. I don't' see anything to lower credibility of the article.

it's clearly not an in depth product review but rather one individual's personal experience in transitioning from XP to the MAC.

I feel it is something other XP users may find very useful and informative.

If you want a byte by byte comparison there are tons of those out there.

not sure why you are looking to undermine the guy's piece.

Dreamweaver is supplied with both Windows and Mac versions on the disc - wish more people would do this

I was unaware of this...I bought a downloadable Studio MX..I just got the windows version.

Mactel + wine??? I have native Photoshop CS and Dreamweaver on my Mac. The cost of the Mac versions of these programs are basically the same as their Windows counterparts.

He said he already owns them. People don't like re-buying the same version of a program you know.
Geez, try reading.

The best thing to do is to keep the Windows version than make the switch to Mac OS when your version are being obsolete. That's what I've done. Virtual PC is also a good solution for some softwares.

Some editors give also Mac/Windows versions on the same CD/DVD and they offer discount if you upgrade from Windows to Mac.

Yes, after a longer time it would be better.

I switched from Windows/Linux to my Mac ~4 Months ago, and I am really extremly happy. I just can't imagine to work with Windows or Linux anymore.

For me, Mac is really a "just works" experience, and I am very happy about that at home.

Adobe offers Photoshop for Mac for $8 if you have purchased the Windows version. That should help a little bit.

Have you tried Roxio Toast 6 Titanium? I've only just gotten a Firewire DVD-/+RW for my Mini today so havent had time to try it, but I'm pretty sure it would read/write to multi-session DVDs

Sorry, here's a Roxio forum post confirming : http://boards.support.roxio.com/roxio/board/message?board.id=000002...
I was sure I read it in their FAQ also but I can't find it. Works fine for multisession CDs though. Hence the claim it can do multisession

Dragon Burn claims to do multi-seesion DVD, but don't bother - it's a piece of crap that doesn't work.

You know, before the programs you should have a driver that does it

My PowerBook has a tilde ~ under the escape key

On my keyboard (Belgian layout), I have the pipe symbol at ALT-SHIFT-L and the curly braces at ALT-N.
Sure, I had to look for them too.
It is indeed sad that they are not printed on the keyboard themselves...
But since I know where they're located, it isn't a problem for me anymore.
With the keyboard viewer, you can find more of these "hidden keys".

Yeah I eventually found them too, but now I have them mapped to were they should be. This is especially handy if you have to use generic keyboards at work, less confusion.

But I still say it takes a special kind of sadist to 'hide' the pipe on a unix machine and curly braces on an OS whose main programming language is a c variant :-)

On a good note quality and battery time for the bluetooth version is excellent.

It's true. On an (french) AZERTY Mac keyboard, some keys are hard to find/use. Windows/PC AZERTY keyboard layout is far better but requires the use of Alt Gr key.

But after a few days/months, you get used to the AZERTY Mac keyboard and pipe and braces are quite easy to use.

Anyway, you can always use a Windows USB Keyboard on a Mac Mini or PowerMac, so it's not a real problem.

until you realise there is no pipe symbol on it, or curly braces or tilde (~).

I don't know azerty keyboards but I would be very suprised if this is true (e. g. on swiss-german QWERTY keyboards, you'll find | on [OPTION]+[7] and ~ on [OPTION]+[n], which is not obvious when you're used to Windows or Unix).

A good way to find symbols on the keyboard is to activate the input menu on the menu bar (in 10.3.9: System Preferences > International > Input Menu > "Show input menu in menu bar" ==> flag of the currently activated keyboard layout appears in the menu bar), then choose "Show keyboard viewer" from the menu unter the flag. Holding special keys like [OPTION] will show you the keyboard layout with special keys pressed.

I have an Apple bluetooth keyboard and not only does it have the pipe symbol, but it also has the curly braces AND tilde. Did you just make all that up?

I have an Apple bluetooth keyboard and not only does it have the pipe symbol, but it also has the curly braces AND tilde. Did you just make all that up?

Maybe the Belgians pissed off Steve Jobs or something. And don't make me post a picture of my keyboard ;-) (is yours azerty btw?)

My Apple Pro Keyboard, British Layout, doesnt have a # symbol marked on it, it is accessible via the number 3 key which only has the Pound symbol and the number 3 marked on it.

All the special characters ARE there, they simply are not printed on the keys.
ALT + 8/9 = { }
ALT + 5/6 = [ ]
ALT + N = ~

Mac OS X provides a "virtual" keyboard on which you'd have seen that a ~ is done with alt-n and | with alt-shift-L

Mine has the pipe symbol above the backward slash?

On a recent Podcast I was listening to, infact a Linux podcast they said that the Mac Mini is an iBook smashed into a small box. So the sort of performance you'd get from an iBook is what you'd get as it is built around Laptop technology.

Actualy it's an eMac but that's splitting hairs ;-)

I'm looking forward to transition to Mac, but it's interesting to know how fast it is compared to normal G4s and iMacs.

Check out the Macintosh Performance Comparison ( http://www.macintouch.com/perfpack/comparison.html )
My advice is to go to your local mac dealer and play around with the display machines for a while, I spent almost 2 days there before forking over my hard earned cash :-).

If my 5 year old PowerBook is fast enough the MacMini definately will be. It is definately much faster than a 1.4 GHz Celeron.

If you load up the mini with a Gig of RAM it would have no problems whatsoever of running Photoshop. I have a couple Macs at home including an older iMac G3 DV edition running at 600Mhz and it runs OS X and everything I throw at it just fine believe it or not. A 1.25 G4 is way faster. You might consider Adobe Elements though if you don't want to fork over your first-born for the CS2 suite as it has most of the functionality of Photoshop at a fraction of the price. I have both Elements and the Adobe CS suite and I find myself using Elements more often.

I've been using a G3 900 with tiger to do Print work on a regular basis (once a month) and web work with all the aps open all the time.
this is a G3 iBook with sucky graphics.
Why would it be hard to do stuff on a 1.4Ghz G4.
what is wrong with you poeple?
I mean there has not been a computer that you couldn't use to do this work on since the G4 500, and Athlon 1Ghz.
I think people are too nice to sucky software devs like Adobe and Macromedia who write Bloto application upgrades that are USELESS on older hardware.
anyway all this too say that there is no reason that a G4 1.4 with enough ram could not be used to work on daily.
especially if you get a faster external drive.
This is not a game machine that needs to render polygons.
man.
the thing that always gets me is that if you got an ID magazine design annual or even ComArts design Annual most of the people who win are not using your best of the best machines, as they actually are working , not Wyning.

The mini runs as fast as the standard Mac laptop, but the HD seems run slower on the low end 'A' model. For general use it can run just abount anything outt of the box, using standard PC keyboards, mice and monitors. Products like PhotoShop, Final Cut and CAD software run fine, but you will want to pump up the memory as these apps are RAM hogs and the OS reserves half of your memory for itself.

For better performance I generally attach or boot from an good external FireWire (Lacie) drive and use it as a post production rendering station for Film, DVD and Broadcast media. It also costs far, far less than a dual G5 and runs quieter as well.

iMac G5 performance is going to be far greater than Standard G5 first its a 64bit chip, and it's got better performance per clock cycle, just that it produces alot of heat.

I sure hope you meant Standard G4

oops, thanks for pointing my typo out bryanv, I did mean G4

no..they still just plain suck. I have emailed them 4 or 5 times telling them (yhoo/sbc) but too no avail.. they have all this multimedia stuff.. and if you run linux or macos..yer fooked.. let me repeat THEY SUCK.

FYI: SBC is the DSL provider; Yahoo is the content provider. This issue would fall upon Yahoo. Well, I am not above smacking SBC when they deserve it.

Don't forget that Netscape 4.7 isn't the latest and greatest... there's also a 4.8...

itunes has free music videos
and soon will have much more video stuff…mb

I was going to suggest this myself. It is a fantastically simple and easily accessible (although sometime not fast enough) to all your Apps.

I'd much preffer buying a boxed product from the local computer stores than having to run something off the internet. In my opinion that whole Internet as a platform thing should not happen any time soon, the internet isn't reliable enough to be my OS and I preffer to own what I have, not rent it.

internet you OS? google for OS please

> The proprietary Microseft Windows XP [...] Piss poor hardware support [...]
> OS X : [...] great hardware support [...]

Yeah, MacOS X has better PowerPC support than Windows XP!

Smart, smart man.

I personally don't want to waste time with supporting a "tool" I'm supposed to be using. Hence why I don't have a Windows box at home. I do use it right now at work, but only because I'm forced to. I can't believe how common minor problems that aren't hardware related pop up.

Here here. I did the exact same thing. Got her an iBook, wireless network, set it up and left.

I don't even know the passwords on this thing anymore.

We ran into the iBook logic board problem but that was resolved promptly, and I finally stuffed another 512M into it (we were using the stock 128M for almost a year -- quite usable, just slow transitions from app to app).

I shared the printer on my W2K box, and the durn thing Just Worked (though I recently reinstalled the printer, so now it's broken for her...I'll get 'round to it soon enough).

I tried something similar, but found that sharing the printer from Windows using Zone Alarm as my firewall causes all the other computers on the network not to be able to communicate with that Windows box or the printer connected to it.

I'm aware that Zone Alarm can be set up to allow specific IP addresses, the problem is that all the computers have to use DHCP and the IP addresses do change quite regularly. What firewall do you use?

Is there no way to allow an entire IP range with zone alarm? Eg., 192.168.1.*

The problem is that the ip address of the laptop is not from an internal network but rather whatever my ISP assigns to it. That means that if I set it up to accept an entire IP range, everyone else with the same ISP could wind up with one of the ip addresses within that range and thus get around my firewall.

she should be able to login to her office's exchange network if mail is set for IMAP (not sure if entourage supports it, i would think so as it is another MS product).

or is she wanting to be able to login to the domain and be on the network itself? i would think that should be doable if she connects to the server?

as for the rest, i would prefer to spend the money on a mac and be able to use my computer and know what is going on with it and have control.

thanks i'll look into it

Have you done a search in your Applications folder, both of them (lite) versions come free with Panther

And if they did not the lite versions are free to download

Yep it sure does and its pretty good for most simple tasks but if you want to be able to import Visio diagrams and have more capabilities you should look at buying the latest Professional release.

should have worded that slightly better, I meant the menu's present in iTunes, iPhoto, Finder etc, where they point to locations and such.

But as you say it was present in NeXT so there is a possibility it is still there, hidden deep in some configuration file.