my noob thread

hope this is alright, im sure all of these questions are answered elsewhere on the forums and certainly online and I am looking for answers to all of them but I wanted to start a thread for all my dumb questions since i think they are all 2 second answers for someone who has been using a mac for more than 7 minutes

just bought my mac pro, brandy new to apple, been a pc user for years and years



can I not right click on links in firefox? to click like "open in new tab"?

are the end and home keys on my keyboard not supported? I am using a logitech wireless desktop setup that i had on my PC. It has the apple logos on the the apporpriate keys and is working so far very well, just annoyed at not having use of home, end and hold-shift-to-highlight. Like when my cursor is in the URL bar in firefox, i normall hit end or home, then hold shift and press the other to clear whatever is there...

in iChat can I rearrange my groups how I want? I am just using it for aim and i have like 7 user groups and have a certain order the groups are listed in as well as the order of the users within those groups, can i do this all manually or is it only alphabetical or something in ichat?

I am running dual dell LCDs....how can I change the background on the 2nd screen and/or select one image to span both etc etc...

I bought 4GB extra ram from OWC. installed and seems to work really well...where can I see how much RAM is installed...and is there any system utility to test the ram and/or its performance?

what are active and/or hot corners?

further silly questions to be posted as i come up with them

 

awesome, thanks for the quick responses....

my backgrounds window on screen 2 was just behind another window...

about the right click....i have right click enabled in general system preferences, as i can use right click everywhere else, its just in firefox it doesnt seem to work when im hovering over a link or something...ddid you mean in firefox preferences?

another question: sometimes my mac seems to give me the generic PC speaker monotonous beep for an extended period of time (10-30 seconds maybe?) it happened once when it was trying to open an avi file that it ultimately wasnt able to open, and then just now I tried to draf 75 gigs of data from one drive and drop it into another drive (both internal SATA, source drive is windows formatted)...it just beeped for 30 seconds and then started copying...whats the deal with that?

 

interesting turn of events....it seems the right-click is working in firefox, but for some reason, the firefox window is like in "always on top" mode it would appear since the popup when i rightclick pops up behind the firefox window, thus being invisible and inaccessbile


also, the beeping i mentioned.......looks like its coming from my APC, UPS backup....i dunno why its doing that but it is...not a mac issue though

 

few more questions/issues. these are mostly just things that kind of bug me (coming from PCs) and i am curious if they are possible in osx and/or what the "mac way" of doing them is....

when i right click on a file in finder or go to the menus, i dont see "cut" copy paste rename delete etc etc options

theres no filmstrip or thumbnails view for browsing folders with tons of media files

the preview and/or slideshow features for looking through images dont seem to allow you to press delete to delete a file youd ecide you dont want

Is there an awesome mp3 player for osx like winamp? I saw some mention of macamp but cant tell if im downloading an old crappy version from someone's old website or the more recent version...

what is the preferred OSX VNC viewer?

 

so im starting to look at itunes and when i dragged a bunch of songs into a playlist it said like "copying 1 of 14" at the top and went through each song...is it copying them somewhere where they will be taking up HD space? i doubt that it is but it seems odd for it to not be instantaneous to just add songs to a playlist

 

so i have been doing a little more looking into this...is itunes seriously copying every mp3 i add to a playlist into a folder under itunes->itunes music? This seems ridiculously inefficient...what other audio players are there for osx?

again I go back to winamp on windows...its kind of a shame to go from crappy slow windows PCs where I drag songs into playlists and they are instantly queued to a muuuch faster mac pro where I have to wait a few seconds for files to be copied (thus taking up twice as much disk space) before being queued.

 

interesting...

So it sounds like A) a different mindset than im used to where instead of dragging songs into my playlist when I want to listen to them, I keep all my songs - thousands of them - in itunes at all times....and just add them to different playlists as i want to listen to them....

or B) disable the copy option in preferences in itunes and presumably use itunes like the winamp I am used to...

im inclined to go with B but what do you long time mac users with large music collections tend to prefer? None of my music came or comes from itunes.com so im not sure if that makes approach A a little less applicable...seems like it might