Questions before converting

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Hello all, new here, first post. Another can you make me a Mac convert?

I am a point where I am starting to shop for a new computer this fall. I have always had a pc/windows. I am almost beyond curious with OSX/Mac, but extremely cautious. After all of the windows operating systems, I love Windows 7. I already hate the looks of Windows 8 (tiles).

I investigate at BestBuy with the iMac and Apple laptops every chance I can. Nice op system, but the text on the 15 MBP, 21.5 and the 27 is somewhat blurry compared to a windows laptop with 1920 x 1080 resolution on a 17.3 inch. Yep, they are larger screens and yes I know about retina and how awesome it looks, but retina does not extend to an external monitor. If I purchase a 15-16 inch laptop, I need to use a larger external monitor and I like native resolutions. One thing I failed to do was make sure I was looking at the monitor at my optimum distance. I will do that on my next visit. With my mid-lens on my trifocals is about arm’s length. Yes, youth has passed me by. I am confident someone here can correct my perception on this. In-store is not the same as at home, maybe I just need more time with the Macs.

Use-wise, probably internet 60%, Office (Word) 30%, photos 5% and combat flight sims less than 5% of my computer time, all roughly. Flight sims and games used to be much more.

Will I be able to view files and folders on my external drives that were created with Windows? Mostly documents, photos and saved web pages (firefox).

Will an iPad help setting a feel for the OSX system? I have android now, but am waiting for fall for the new ipads you all are talking about here and elsewhere.

I have searched these forums looking for my specific questions, but the closest I could find were kind of general, and I will continue to search here and elsewhere. Gives me a chance to introduce myself.

I may and probably will have more questions later, but this will be a start. Thank you for your time reading and for your input.
 
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2012 Mac Mini 2.5ghz OSX 10.10; Black MacBook (late 2006) OSX 10.6.8
Assuming your external drives are formatted as NTFS, as far as I know, OS X will be able to read the drive but not write to it without third-party software. A workaround I used was to copy all the contents of my external drive to my Mac's internal hard drive, reformat the external drive as HFS+ using Disk Utility, and copying the contents back to the external drive. As far as actually opening the files, you shouldn't have any problem there; though I'm not sure how Firefox saves web pages, it would make sense that the OSX version of Firefox could open those files.

In my experience, using an iPad does not help all that much as far as getting a feel for how OS X works. A number of multitouch gestures are physically similar, but they do different things across platforms (for example, the same physical gesture, an inward pinching with four fingers, shows the home screen on an iPad and launchpad on OS X).

Another thing to remember is that you can always install a copy of Windows 7 or 8 on your mac using Boot Camp Assistant if OS X isn't quite your thing or for playing that combat flight simulator you like. I remember hearing reports of less-than-ideal support for resolution scaling under windows on retina MacBook Pro models, but that was some time ago.
 
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Thank you dhmmjoph. I may or may not install Windows on the Mac, but at least I know I can. ;)
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
Regarding the rendering of fonts, need to understand the philosophy behind both of the operating systems.

One is for reading - Windows
One is for print - OS X

I prefer Windows myself and took me a year to get use to OS X's font rendering on my computers and can handle it on screens up to 27-32" and it's a non-issue for me now on my notebooks. Still hate reading OS X on my big screen TVs at 1080p. For me, this is the reason OS X really requires a resolution befitting the size of the screen, while Windows can look quite good on lower resolution monitors.

Have a read of these 2 articles.
Font rendering philosophies of Windows & Mac OS X » DamienG
Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering - Joel on Software
 
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Wow, a lot of good information there, thank you bobtomay. That should keep me busy for a while. ;)
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
I can warn you, if you're picky about wanting sharp text on larger monitors, you'll need to spend more money on those larger monitors and buy computer "monitors" not one of those larger screens that are really designed for watching movies and whose max resolution is 1080p.
 

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