Generally speaking, I’d call myself a Mac guy. I’ve used Windows pretty much since it came out, but it frustrates and annoys me.
That said, there are some things I like better about Windows than Macintosh OS. There are also some things that frustrate me because I go back and forth between the two operating systems every day, and minor differences in their behavior drive me nuts. Perhaps some of you customization gurus (I hesitate to call you “the usual suspects” :D) could help me tweak my Windows and MacOS installations:
[ol]
[li]On Windows, you can grab any corner of a window to resize it. On Mac, only the lower-right corner works. Is there a Mac setting to make all four corners work?[/li][li]On MacOS, when I click on a scrollbar, the “thumb” moves directly to where I clicked. On Windows, it jumps one page toward the place I clicked. I want Windows to act like MacOS here.[/li][li]On Windows Alt-Tab takes you from window to window. If you have two windows open in the same application, it will cycle through both. On MacOS, it takes you from application to application. If one window is obscured, you may never see it. I’d like to alter MacOS’ behavior.[/li][li]It’s easy to open docs or applications on MacOS without taking your hands off the keyboard using Spotlight. For example, to open my FTP client, I press Cmd-Spacebar, FT, Enter. For the beer article I’m writing, Cmd-Spacebar, beer, enter. Windows requires a bunch of mousing around to do this. Is there a Windows equivalent I don’t know about?[/li][li]On the Mac, if I unhook the second monitor on my laptop, everything on the second screen moves automatically to the primary screen. On Windows, I have to remember to drag any open windows over first, or they’re floating off in space where I can’t get to them. I assume this is a bug, but it’s driving me nuts.[/li][li]When I plug in a flash drive on MacOS, it becomes available for use. When I plug in a flash drive on Windows, it starts popping up dialog boxes, asking questions about what to do, and generally being annoying. How do I make Windows just shut the heck up and make the drive available?[/li][/ol]
1 - Not that I know of.
2 - You might be able to use Microsoft’s TweakUI for this - just be aware that MS has never formally supported TweakUI and that it may not work on anything newer than XP.
3 - Try Command-` (the tick under the tilde) and see if that’s useful.
4 - Haven’t seen anything like that since the days of Norton Desktop.
5 - It’s just how Windows behaves. If you right-click the app in the taskbar and select Move, you can slide it over with the left-arrow key.
6 - I think you can select something in those Windows dialogs about the default behavior.
I can’t vouch for any of these, but a little searching found the following possibilities: MondoMouse, Zooom/2, and Afloat. Each claims to, among other things, give you more flexible ways to resize a window; there are probably other programs out there as well. Having to use the bottom-right corner to resize never bothered me enough to search out something like this, but obviously there are enough people who it does bother for programmers to have come up with solutions.
There used to be a small program to do exactly this. I think it was called QuickStart. I used it when I had XP but now I can’t seem to find it on google. Win7 has a built in feature that provides a similar function. It’s not as good as QuickStart was, but it works most of the time.
If you hold the mouse button down, Windows will keep scrolling until the thumb is under the mouse pointer. I should note that the behaviour of scrolling when the scroll bar is clicked is partially up to the application. Windows has default behaviour for stock controls that it provides, but applications are free to implement their own logic for any sort of scrolling.
As jz78817 says, on Vista or Windows 7, if you hit the Windows key and then type a keyword, Windows will show you all instances of that keyword in its index. This can inlude file names, but with some types of documents, it can include text within the file as well. A lot of tutorials on how to use lesser-know features of Windows use this capability rather than describing how to navigate all the way through the menus. So, if you want to get to the Component Services applet, you can just hit the Windows key and then type “services”.
You’re right that Windows has an annoying habit of not automatically moving open apps to the primary monitor when you remove one. I’m not about to disconnet my monitor to confirm this, but IIRC, all you have to do is hit Windows+D twice (once to minimize all windows and another to restore them).
[ol]
[li]This is actually a feature of MacOS that prevents you from accidentially resizing windows.[/li][li]Application dependent[/li][li]Command+'[/li][li]MacOS X is designed to be used either strictly from the keyboard or largely via GUI navigation. Windows (through XP at least) has a jumbled appraoch for human interface that requires both keyboard and GUI input.[/li][li]shrug[/li][li]There are some settings to reduce the number of popups, but in general OS X handles peripherals much better. A single “Eject” command is enough to disconnect the device regardless of whether Finder windows are open (though it will bulk if you are actively using applications or writing onto the drive) but Windows often requires a number of steps to make a thumbdrive or other USB device ready to detatch.[/li][/ol]
I highly recommend Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual as a guide to all of the features and interfaces for OS X 10.6 that seem intuitive once you’ve used them but aren’t obvious or well documented by the minimalist literature or help system. They also have a line of guides for Windows operating systems, but I’ve never used them as I a) have a lot of experience using 2000 and XP, b) do a good portion of my work on Linux systems, and c) don’t really want to waste brain capacity knowing anything more about Windows than I need to.
I just tried this with my laptop. The window on the unplugged monitor moved to the laptop monitor, but plugging the second monitor back in screwed up my resolution on the laptop (the laptop is a 15:9 LCD, and the external is a 4:3 CRT).
With Windows 7 on default settings the steps for removing a drive are pretty damn simple: Make sure you aren’t writing anything to the drive, disconnect the drive.
Fair enough; I haven’t used Windows 7 in anything but a cursory fashion (company computers are still on XP due to “homogenization policies” of IT) and so my comparisons don’t extend to Vista or 7.
it’s true for XP as well. Removable drives have write caching disabled by default so as long as you aren’t in the process of writing something to them, you can just yank the plug out. OS X and Linux will bitch about not properly unmounting the volume first.
And I feel your pain about XP. we’re stuck on it at work because of some stupid SAP thing that isn’t compatible with Vista/7, and it’s grating to still have to use that decrepit old POS.
On the off chance you might know… is there a way to access minimized windows on the Mac using only the keyboard? I’ve Googled my butt off, but still haven’t found a way to do this.
Is there a list of Mac keyboard commands somewhere? I feel the opposite: that windows supports keyboards much better, while mac makes (single-button?) mouse use almost mandatory.
No, it doesn’t require any more work. I watch people do it the “wrong” way all the time and it drives me nuts. You LEFT click on the icon in the System Tray, and disconnect the right device. Everybody right clicks, selects “Safely Remove Hardware,” then “Stop,” then selects the device. This works too, but takes forever. And of course, you really don’t need to disconnect devices if they aren’t actively transmitting, if you have “Optimize for quick removal” or something like that checked. One annoyance is that XP doesn’t mark USB sticks by name, but Vista and 7 do.