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Going From Mac to Win95 (Temporarily)
from Lethargy/Francis.... (5/1)
I use both a Macintosh Quadra and a Pentium computer at home, however my parents only use the Macintosh. Recently our AppleVision 1710av monitor went in for repair and they were forced to use my Pentium for sending and receiving email. There is at least *some* similarity between the MacOS and Windows 95 so I figured it wouldn't be too bad... but as I watched them in action I noticed a couple of things (and they were only using Eudora Light, not Windows Explorer, mind you):
* My parents constantly pressed the right mouse button instead of the left. The single button Macintosh mouse encourages you to place only your index finger on the top of your mouse. On a two-button mouse, this single finger falls - you guessed it - directly over the right mouse button. They felt uncomfortable placing two fingers on top of the mouse.
* They were constantly bringing background windows to the foreground. I eventually realised that they were trying to use the scroll bars! Scroll bars of background windows in Windows 95 do not dim out or disappear as they do in the MacOS (imagine that) - only the title bar dims. So they were constantly clicking the scroll bars of background windows instead of foreground windows.
* They would inadvertedly press the "Insert" key and whatever they typed at the cursor would replace what was already there. This confused them since the Macintosh does not have a "Insert/Replace" mode.
* My mother did not know how to get accent characters and bullets. When I told her that she had to hold down Alt and type "0149" on the keypad to get a bullet instead of typing Option-8, and hold down Alt and type "0233" to get , instead of typing Option-E-e, she was aghast. Of course, there is always the Character Map program, but the letters are tiny and finding the special character you're looking for is like playing "Where's Waldo". Not to mention that the equivalent Key Caps on the Macintosh gives you a visual representation of the keyboard which helps you to remember which keys to press the next time.
* They kept pressing Alt-Z instead of Control-Z for Undo. The Alt key is positioned right where the Command key is on a Macintosh. Also, the position of the Control key on Windows computers makes you stretch your fingers more to perform keyboard shortcuts. And now that *all* PC keyboards come with that handy-dandy Windows key getting in your way, performing something like Control-Alt-2 is a bigger pain-in-the-wrist than before. Can you say "Twister"?
Of course I've noticed a couple of things myself:
* There isn't a decent Note Pad for Windows 95. The one that comes with Windows is just a basic text editor. I want one that lets me keep pages of information, like a real note pad, and automatically saves the information when I close it (just like the Macintosh). I did check on the internet for one, but they were all over 1 megabyte compressed! No wonder Dell and Gateway are shipping their systems with 6-gigabyte and larger disk drives.
* There is no keyboard shortcut for creating a new folder as in the MacOS. Where you would normally press Command-N, you now have to right click, go to the *bottom* of the pop up menu, click on "New", move the cursor to the submenu and click on "Folder". Thanks Microsoft.
* There is no keyboard shortcut for getting information about a file or folder. Also the "Properties" command (equivalent of Get Info) is at the *bottom* of both the File menu and the pop up menu.
* Renaming a file on the Macintosh is easy - click on the name of an icon and it highlights it or, highlight an icon and press Return. But in Windows, you have to highlight the icon first, *then* click on the name before you can change it. And don't press Enter thinking it'll highlight the name for you - it'll launch the icon.
* When you choose the "View: Details" command in Windows and "Arrange by Name" it sticks all the folders at the top alphabetically and all the files at the bottom alphabetically. As a matter of fact, no matter how you "Arrange" the window, Windows 95 puts all the folders at the top of the window.
* Windows has no real provision for storing icon positions. It only remembers the last few windows that you've moved the icons to absolute positions within the window. So in Windows you wouldn't want to arrange your desktop the way lots of Mac users arrange it - with icons along the edges of the desktop. Because one day you might start up your machine and find all the icons "Arranged by Name", Windows style, in the left hand side of the desktop. Also starting up the computer in Safe Mode effectively destroys all your precious icon locations when next you start up in Normal Mode. Nothing like that happens when you start a Mac with extensions off.
* Speaking of which, it's easy to turn individual extensions and control panels on and off using Extensions Manager, as well as installing and removing them. In Win95 it's very hard to isolate memory resident (equivalent of Extensions) software conflicts. You can't disable individual memory resident programs. However you do get the choice of starting up with barely nothing (Safe Mode). And pray that your Windows program comes with an uninstaller. Mac users love to laugh when they hear of these uninstallers - "You need a program to remove a program? Hahaha! Good one! What happens when you need to remove the program that removes the programs? Get another program? Hahaha!"
* Windows has no provision for showing you the total size of the contents of a folder without getting *each and every* folder's "Properties". Mac users have the "Calculate folder sizes" option for seeing the size of all the folders at a glance.
* There is no easy way to get a screenshot in Windows without downloading a shareware package (example Screen Thief). Other than than you have to press "Print Screen", go to Paintbrush, create a new full screen document and press paste. And if you're running in 16 bit colour or higher, you have to save in 24 bit BMP format, which yields files *bigger* than 1 megabyte. Mac users just press Command-Shift-3. Oh, and did I mention that full screen full colour Macintosh PICT images are typically 200 kilobytes? I am beginning to see why so many PC's come with Zip drives standard now.
* When you put a folder into the Recycle Bin, it puts the *individual files* in there and does not preserve the folder structure. In the Macintosh the folder structure is preserved so that if we change our mind we can yank the whole folder out of there. Not so in Windows. Speaking of the Recycle Bin, if you're not careful setting the Recycle Bin reserved space, it will start deleting files even before you select "Empty Recycle Bin". And compared with the Macintosh it takes forever to move files to the Recycle Bin and forever to delete them.
* The Control-F keyboard in Windows only works if you have a Windows Explorer window open. That is, if you're on the desktop and feel like looking for a file, you *have* to use the Start menu: Find files or folders command. Also the Find command is very inefficient. My Macintosh Quadra is supposedly 10 times slower than this Pentium yet it finds files by name on multiple volumes in 2 - 4 seconds. By contrast the Pentium machine takes over 10 seconds to do a similar search on a *single* volume. Even after caching the directory structure in RAM, subsequent searches take over 5 seconds. I can't wait to see Apple's V-Twin Find file in operation.
* The Taskbar is a terrible implementation... really. Once you have more than 5 windows open you can't see the name of the buttons. It forces you to stretch the Taskbar upwards or downwards, eating up screen real estate, or click on each of the buttons at random until you find the window you're looking for. Plus, a program like Netscape or Internet Explorer puts a button on the taskbar for each and every "document" it opens. So if you have 4 Netscape windows open, that's 4 buttons on the taskbar. This is unlike the MacOS application menu which only lists the programs - you then select whatever "document" you want from the Window menu.
* Microsoft really messed up when they decided to program the Windows Registry. It isn't easy to remove every trace of a program in the registry the same way Mac users chunk a program's preferences into the Trash. Also I have already damaged my entire registry once when the RAM I installed turned out to be defective. And, I have heard many other stories about other Windows users who had to reinstall Windows 95 and every single program when their registry went bye bye.
* And, last but not least, Apple has, in my opinion, the best Text-to-Speech software out there. Also has very good Speech Recognition. Windows 95 does not come with either one.
By the way I have found that the fastest way to shut up a stubborn ignorant Windows user is to turn on the Macintosh, say "Computer: Hello!" and the computer says "Hello, Welcome to Macintosh" right back at me. Then I turn on the video camera and say "Computer: open Video Monitor" and focus the video camera on the stubborn Windows user's face. Then I say "Computer: Copy, open Word, Computer: Paste, Computer: Print" (big grin) Of course, I only then drop the big bombshell and tell them that it's a 5 year old Macintosh AV machine - then I say "Computer, Dial 911" - - nah, just kidding on that last part ;-)
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