Keyboard and Safari queries

[dmarshall]

I am a newbie to Mac and I am now trying to use a refurbished ibook G4 14".
that I bought.
Things are great except for three queries:

(i)Last night, on starting it up and opening up the browser, every box that
required something to be entered (e.,g., the search engine box on
www.yahoo.com/www.google.com, or the boxes for login and password)
were full up of the character
///////////////////////////
As I deleted them, more appeared.
I had to restart the ibook about five times before this problem stopped.
I assumed it was a faulty key and on looking at a keyboard layout diagram
for the ibook it seems the / character is on the )0 key and reached through
the fn option. I checked this particular key and it seems to be fine. Can
anyone shed any light on why this may have happened please?

(ii)The ibook came with a safari browser - when clicked, this fills the
whole ibook screen. With browsers on a PC, its possible to reduce them in
size by placing the cursor on the borders and moving these inward so, for
example, the desktop can still be seen and accessed - is there any way
of reducing the size of the safari browser on the ibook?

(iii)On a PC, by pressing three kys (Ctrl, Alt and Del), a menu appears that
allows (in theory anyway!) the user to shut down any program that has
become 'stuck'. I find Safari sometimes hangs and then will not close - all
I get is a multi-coloured circle spinning around - Is there anything on the
ibook that I can use that will force a program to close?

Thanks and sorry to sound so dim.

Regards

David

 

[swiftaw]

ii) Resize by clicking and dragging the bottom right hand corner of a window

iii) Click Alt+Command+Escape

 

[spinnerlys]

1. Repair Permissions via Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities)

2.

The little bottom right corner allows you to resize windows.

3. CMD+OPTION/ALT+ESC or Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.


Also a reinstallation of Mac OS X might work wonders, you never know what the previous user put on there, and since the iBooks are out of Apple's line up for almost 4 years, I doubt you can get them refurbished now.

Also of vital information: http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/ and http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/

 

[swiftaw]

3. CMD+OPTION/ALT+ESC or Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.

Or Apple Logo->Force Quit

 

[RangerFan104]

I don't really know what to say about the first problem, there could even be something stuck under the keys.

To resize the safari, go to the bottom right corner of the screen, there are 3 diagonal lines. Click and drag them to resize the window.

Instead of Ctrl Alt Delete, you have 2 options on a mac. One is Option+Command+Esc. Or you can go Apple Menu>Force Quit
Once the window opens, select the stuck application and click Force Quit.

 

[dmarshall]

Thanks & different browser for ibook

First and foremost, many thanks to those who replied to my questions. All the
information given has been of tremendous help.
The one thing I cannot understand is that Safari now seems to lock up or hang
for no apparent reason, which has not happened before (even though I'm
viewing the same webpages as before, e.g., yahoo.co.uk, google.com).
I was thinking of downloading another browser to try - I see Mozillla Firefox
and Opera have a version for the mac - (I'm running OSX Tiger 10.4.11). Is
either of these better than the other?

Thanks

David

 

[Gregg2]

Browser wars are frequent in forums like this one. It's a matter of personal preference as to which is "best". Some people also swear by Camino, and I'm sure there are more that you did not name. Try one for awhile, ask questions to work out the kinks, then if you aren't satisfied, try another one.