Questions from a recent switcher...

I recieved my iBook today (an older 900 MHz G3) and have some questions.

1. How do I enable the OSX firewall (this iBook as 10.4.7)?

2. There are some smudges on the screen. What could I use to safely remove the smudges?

3. Is there anyway to maximize the windows to fill the whole screen or most of it? I'm mainly referring to Safari as I hate having to scroll everywhere to read stuff (especially horizontal scrolling). Also, are there better browsers?

4. Can I turn off the Widgets? There pretty useless to me. Most of it's useless to me, since I can't choose my city for the weather and whatnot (the closest I can get is Minneapolis, which is 200 miles away).

5. How do I find out the password for the iBook? The original owner installed a fresh copy of OS Tiger on it. Is there some default password? I need to know it in order to install Office.

6. What is the simplest, most stable, quickest web browswer that uses the least amount of resources?

1. Open System Preferences and click "Sharing" under the "Internet & Network". Choose the "Firewall" tab, and you can enable it.

2. I use a mix of no more than 50% Isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol and a very soft cloth. If the rubbing alcohol you buy is greater than 50%, dilute it with water. Do not use Windex or paper towels, as they can scratch the screen or make it go cloudy.

3. The green button on the top left is similar to maximize in that is should resize the window so that you don't have to use horizontal scroll. It does not, however, make the window take up the entire screen, only wide enough so as to not need to use horizontal scroll bars. I find Camino (based on Firefox) to be better than Safari, but also there are Opera, Shiira, OmniWeb, and others you can google for.

4. You could open up Terminal.app as an administrative user and type and press enter. To turn it back on, change the 'YES" to "NO". There are also some prefPanes such as this one, but I have not had any experience with them.

5. It seems that you are looking for a password for an administrative account. I know of no way of finding an admin password short of reinstalling. Is your account an admin account? Go to System Preferences, and go into "Accounts" under System. If your name has "Admin" under it, you are an admin user, and you could just type in your name and password.

6. This will vary depending on who you ask. Personally, I like Camino (link is above), but many use the default Safari, some swear by Firefox, while others love OmniWeb.

Thanks for the help. I've got all of that under control now. Man, OSX is so much easier to use and more neatly organized than Windows.

Anyway, what is the best way to uninstall programs that gets rid of it entirely?

simplest way is to just drag the app to the trash. however, this sometimes leaves preference files and occasionally other files behind.

one of the best ways to completely uninstall is to do a spotlight search of the app and remove all the associated files. Another quick and easy way is to use AppZapper or a similar app. All you do is drag the unwanted app onto the specified area and it finds all/most of the associated files and allows you to delete them. Its pretty much the same thing as a spotlight search but its quicker and it costs about $13.