i went out and got a mac. im really diggin it so far, but its a little frustrating b/c im so used to the win environment, control and feel. i need some advice on how to customize it with widgets and other s/w. please let me know if you have any ideas for:

1 a video player. i cant stand how small quicktime is in the firefox browser. i want o play mpgs, wmv, and other formats in one app

2 any cool and useful widgets

3 how do you have the mouse setup? i know this is personal preference. just want to hear ideas

4 desktop corner 'hotkeys'(?). same as above.

5 ITUNES is sorta driving me nuts. at first it was great b/c it was really fast. but i realized that it copied all 150 gb of the music on my external hd to the itunes default folder and on top of that there was a bunch of duplicated songs. why?? i didnt want to waste the space on the main hd, so i fooled around with it and unchecked the 'copy music to itunes folder', made the itunes folder my external hd music folder, but left the 'let itunes organize the music'. well, this screwed me b/c it took all my music on the external hd folder and rearranged them and now some of my music has been moved. this really ticked me off, but i can deal with it. the point of this rant is, is there a better audio tool for playing, organizing, and linking my ipod?

6 bootcamp / parrallels. parrallels was initially working great until i updated the mac o/s and updated win xp after i installed it. now its really slow and freezes. should i reinstall parrallels. how do i uninstall it?
is bootcamp better? i just want to have xp available in case theres some s/w that only runs on win.


throw out any other ideas or suggestions. thanks for your time people! i really appreciate it.

I love hot corners on my mac. One corner takes me to the desktop, one corner lets me choose apps, one corner puts on my screensaver, and one corner brings my widgets up.

I've been thinking about getting a Mac. What the Hell is a widget???

With questions like that, you should definitely get a mac. Us PC and Linux users don't want you.

white midget

get VLC player.
although i prefer to use Quick Time Player, sometimes vlc is good.

This post deserved more respect than it got.

Quicktime is great on Macs, runs quickly and smoothly. If videos are too small in your browser, it has nothing to do with QT. Videos play at their native resolution or whatever the web designer has set them at, regardless of the player. Is your screen resolution set very high? Higher resolution will make things look smaller.

You'll definitely want to install VLC Media Player, which will play almost any kind of video, works great for AVIs, DivX, and whatnot.



iTunes is pretty much the best music manager out there, but I agree that those issues can be frustrating. You probably don't want to set your iTunes folder to anything other than the default. Keep your music collection in separate folders or an external drive in your case. Turn off the 'copy music to itunes folder' and 'let itunes organize the itunes folder' settings. This way iTunes won't touch the music in your other folders, and if you import CDs they'll be neatly organized in your default iTunes folder. That's how I do it, anyway, and haven't run into any problems.

i agree to the max!