Originally posted by plasticparadox
There is at least one virus for Mac OS X.
Actually, there isn't. If you read the piece quoted at this link, you'll notice the reference to the "Lite Side staff" near the end, and the observation that perhaps this should have been posted under humor.
Reason: the Swichback virus was made up for Low End Mac's humor column, the Lite Side, and is credited to the same pseudonym that Low End Mac publisher Dan Knight uses for their Rumor Mill parody column. Read the original article
here. It was a joke...there's no such thing as the Switchback virus!
I found that qutting applications vs. closing windows, the way drives are handled (mounting vs. drive letters), and software installations were the biggest differences between OS X and Windows. As the other posters above have noted, I kept wanting to do things the complicated, Windows way; occasionally I still do, but overall there was almost NO learning curve to OS X. System Preferences are sooo much simpler than Windows Control Panels that there's almost no comparison. And Preferences for almost any application are always under the Application Menu (shown in the earlier Safari screenshot), so configuration is easy.
The whole "mounting" thing works like this: Under Windows, you have drive letters as placeholders for each physical drive, plus any logical drives on your internal hard disk or network, whether there's anything there or not. On the Mac side, the system will see all the hardware, but a drive will only show up if there's actual media there to be accessed. To give you an idea, longtime Mac users consider it incredible that Windows will list a drive even if there's nothing in it, and additionally consider it one of the flaws of Windows that you have to click on the drive letter to find this out.
For an AIM replacement, I like Adium (look for it on Google or VersionTracker, I'm lazy
) which allows you to have multiple tabbed chats going in the same window, like tabbed browsing. This is great if you're talking to several people at once but don't want to clutter your screen.
As to the durability of Macs, if you're anything like me, you'll WANT a new PowerBook long before you NEED one.....
(gosh, the forums are slow....glad I saved this post to Notepad before trying to submit it!)
