New Mac Mini

I bought myself a new mac mini (the ones using Nvidia GPU and chipsets), the 120GB model but with upgraded ram to 2GB DDR3.

Having never worked on a mac before I am quite excited about owning one and getting a bit of a different perspective than what I am use to.

The mac mini is like what it says on the tin, mini! This computer is about the same size as one of my external hard drives.

I did not opt to buy the mighty mouse and keyboard since I would like to use my existing screen, keyboard and mouse.

After booting it up for the first time you are asked to setup a user account and default settings and to register the product with Apple.

The first thing I noticed was that the default keyboard was set to US, so I went to System settings etc. and configured it to use the British keyboard layout. But it turns out that some keys are still like what they would be on a US keyboard. Coming from South Africa I am used to the US keyboard layout since that is the only layout we use there, however having been in the UK for over 3 years now I have gotten so used the UK layout that I don’t want to be using different layouts, especially since I will be using a KVM switch to work on both my PC and my Mac.

So after a bit of googling I discovered that Apple actually have their own UK layout which is not that far off from the US version. So I would like to use the IBM/PC UK layout and as luck would have it turns out that it is actually easy to create your own custom layouts using an application called Ukelele. Even better luck is that Phil Gyford has already created a layout.

There is another layout from Andy Pearce that alot of people swear by, I still need to try it out…since it seems that everything works for my except Home and End, well atleast in the way I expect it to work (unless it is just one more difference between Mac and PC).

Right so now the keyboard is fixed, what else is “wrong”…lets see… the mouse! By default the mouse is pain stakingly slow to move around the screen. After a bit of tweaks I got something that I can be happy with (yes not 100% happy since I hate pointer acceleration. I hated it on Windows and I will hate it on Mac…but I have not found a way to disable it).

So apart from my rants about the input devices, lets get to the good stuff.

Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard is totally awesome! I am actually starting to like it a lot more than I thought I would have.

The main differences to learn between Mac and Windows is the following:

• When you click on the red globe marked X on a window, it does not stop the application. Instead you have to actually go the menu bar and say close, or Command Q.
• You windows don’t have menu bars, instead you have one big global menu bar at the top that updates dynamically depending on the application window you have selected.
• Instead of using Control to do most things (like keyboard shortcuts) you use Command, which on a windows keyboard is the Windows key.

I have been using computers for about 17 years now (since I was 11) and my first computer was a 286 with 640KB ram. During all of those years I have only ever worked on a PC. The operating systems I know run all the way from MS-DOS 3.x up to the latest Vista for Microsoft and then I have run a couple of Linux distros like Redhat, Mandrake and Ubuntu.

If someone were to come to me that have never touched a computer before and asks me what computer I would recommend, then I would recommend them to get a Mac. My reasons for this would be:

• You get easy to use, easy to learn software for most of your needs already included in the OS. (yes yes I know windows is now starting to include more things and yada yada, but the easy of configuring for a noob would be easier on a mac).
• You don’t need to worry about drivers! (well I have yet to find a device here in my house that doesn’t just work straight out of the box).

The only reason it has taken me this long before buying a Mac, is the price tag. Generally a Mac is more expensive than buying a PC.

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