- Joined
- Jul 2, 2009
- Messages
- 16
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 1
- Location
- Millinocket, Maine
- Your Mac's Specs
- MacBook (MacBook5,1) Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2000 MHz 2 GB - DDR3 @ 1067 MHz NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
After nearly thirty years on a PC, my first computers being a TRS-80 and a Coleco Adam, I made the switch to a Mac a few months ago.
Since I travel a lot, I bought a 13" MacBook. While I wish I had opted for something a bit larger, that's not the main problem that I'm having. Actually, I'm having a couple of problems.
Right click
In trying to find a workable equivalent to a right-click on a PC, for such things as bringing a new browser window up in another tab, the MacBook is aggravating, if not impossible to work with.
I would gather that this is done by using two finger on the mousepad, since that seems to work about 50% of the time, but at least half the time, it will activate whater the cursor is on, whether it be a program or a hyperlink, forcing me to use the back arrow to go back to the original page and try it again, sometimes five or six times before I can get it to do what I want. Maybe there's a trick to that but, if so, I haven't figured it out yet.
Rather than seeking ways to get the Mac to act like a PC, I'd rather figure out how to do things the Mac way, but thus far this one has alluded me.
Since my job involves Internet directories, this is something that I need to do often and it's more than aggravating when multiple tries to get a hyperlink to open in a new tab are unsuccessful, so when I really want to get something done, more and more often, I am reverting to my PC.
I did finally buy a mouse for my MacBook. In doing so, I bought the Apple mouse, although I understand that pretty much any mouse is supposed to work on a MacBook. However, all of the mouse buttons do the same thing, activating whatever it is that my cursor is on, which I could do just as easily with the mouse pad. I'm sure there's a way to control what the mouse buttons do on the mouse but I'd really rather learn how to do such things using the mousepad.
Sometimes when I use two fingers on the mousepad, it acts like a right-click on a PC, but at least half the time it acts as if I had asked it to activate whatever my cursor is on, and I haven't been able to detect anything different that I'm doing with my fingers in order to bring on one or the other response. Rather, it seems to be more like flipping a coin.
Locking up
One of the chief reasons why I have wanted to change to a Mac for years now is that I have heard how much more reliable they are, but mine locks up more often than my PC does.
By locking up, I mean even in doing simple things like moving from one web page to another in Safari, it will sometimes refuse to do so. It's not locked up in the sense that nothing is working. When I click on a hyperlink or enter a URL into the navigation bar, the little whirligig thing will move around for awhile, then stop, without navigating to the page, or giving me an error.
My PC, sitting next to it, will navigate to the same page without trouble, so it's not a site or server problem; and when I try to go to a different page instead, the same thing will happen. When it does this, when I click the red x-button, the window won't close; however, I can click on the "Safari" menu item and close it that way.
I see this more often in Safari, I think, only because that's the browser that I use most often, but I have had this occur in Opera and Firefox as well, so I don't think it's a browser problem.
Problem after closing my MacBook up for the night
Rather than shutting my computer off when I go to bed, I prefer to simply close the cover and have everything that I had been working on the night before waiting for me in the morning.
I use an extra monitor with my MacBook so that I can have a second project loaded on the second monitor and move between the two. This works fine while I'm working, but recently whenever I close my MacBook for the night, it has been moving everything - the navigation icons and whatever I had been working on in the MacBook's monitor - over to the the second monitor.
It didn't used to do that. It just started doing that a couple of weeks ago, and I don't know what I might have done to get it to do that, or how I might be able to get it to stop.
When I open the cover on my MacBook in the morning, everything is on the second monitor and my MacBook screen is black, forcing me to reboot the MacBook in order to restore some sanity to it, which defeats the purpose of not simply shutting the MacBook off every night to begin with.
Quite likely, these are problems that have more to do with my not knowing how to use a Mac, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. The locking up part concerns me because it wastes a lot of my time, and one of the advantages of using a Mac over a PC has traditionally been to avoid such problems. As it is though, it seems that my MacBook gets tired of loading web pages after about eight hours or so and refuses to do so until I reboot, or at least close out the browser.
Since I travel a lot, I bought a 13" MacBook. While I wish I had opted for something a bit larger, that's not the main problem that I'm having. Actually, I'm having a couple of problems.
Right click
In trying to find a workable equivalent to a right-click on a PC, for such things as bringing a new browser window up in another tab, the MacBook is aggravating, if not impossible to work with.
I would gather that this is done by using two finger on the mousepad, since that seems to work about 50% of the time, but at least half the time, it will activate whater the cursor is on, whether it be a program or a hyperlink, forcing me to use the back arrow to go back to the original page and try it again, sometimes five or six times before I can get it to do what I want. Maybe there's a trick to that but, if so, I haven't figured it out yet.
Rather than seeking ways to get the Mac to act like a PC, I'd rather figure out how to do things the Mac way, but thus far this one has alluded me.
Since my job involves Internet directories, this is something that I need to do often and it's more than aggravating when multiple tries to get a hyperlink to open in a new tab are unsuccessful, so when I really want to get something done, more and more often, I am reverting to my PC.
I did finally buy a mouse for my MacBook. In doing so, I bought the Apple mouse, although I understand that pretty much any mouse is supposed to work on a MacBook. However, all of the mouse buttons do the same thing, activating whatever it is that my cursor is on, which I could do just as easily with the mouse pad. I'm sure there's a way to control what the mouse buttons do on the mouse but I'd really rather learn how to do such things using the mousepad.
Sometimes when I use two fingers on the mousepad, it acts like a right-click on a PC, but at least half the time it acts as if I had asked it to activate whatever my cursor is on, and I haven't been able to detect anything different that I'm doing with my fingers in order to bring on one or the other response. Rather, it seems to be more like flipping a coin.
Locking up
One of the chief reasons why I have wanted to change to a Mac for years now is that I have heard how much more reliable they are, but mine locks up more often than my PC does.
By locking up, I mean even in doing simple things like moving from one web page to another in Safari, it will sometimes refuse to do so. It's not locked up in the sense that nothing is working. When I click on a hyperlink or enter a URL into the navigation bar, the little whirligig thing will move around for awhile, then stop, without navigating to the page, or giving me an error.
My PC, sitting next to it, will navigate to the same page without trouble, so it's not a site or server problem; and when I try to go to a different page instead, the same thing will happen. When it does this, when I click the red x-button, the window won't close; however, I can click on the "Safari" menu item and close it that way.
I see this more often in Safari, I think, only because that's the browser that I use most often, but I have had this occur in Opera and Firefox as well, so I don't think it's a browser problem.
Problem after closing my MacBook up for the night
Rather than shutting my computer off when I go to bed, I prefer to simply close the cover and have everything that I had been working on the night before waiting for me in the morning.
I use an extra monitor with my MacBook so that I can have a second project loaded on the second monitor and move between the two. This works fine while I'm working, but recently whenever I close my MacBook for the night, it has been moving everything - the navigation icons and whatever I had been working on in the MacBook's monitor - over to the the second monitor.
It didn't used to do that. It just started doing that a couple of weeks ago, and I don't know what I might have done to get it to do that, or how I might be able to get it to stop.
When I open the cover on my MacBook in the morning, everything is on the second monitor and my MacBook screen is black, forcing me to reboot the MacBook in order to restore some sanity to it, which defeats the purpose of not simply shutting the MacBook off every night to begin with.
Quite likely, these are problems that have more to do with my not knowing how to use a Mac, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. The locking up part concerns me because it wastes a lot of my time, and one of the advantages of using a Mac over a PC has traditionally been to avoid such problems. As it is though, it seems that my MacBook gets tired of loading web pages after about eight hours or so and refuses to do so until I reboot, or at least close out the browser.