Last May, I bought the Mac Mini with a terabyte drive along with a bunch of
accessories. I quickly learned you could run Windows on the Mac and since I
have a couple of programs for ham radio, and digital recording and editing I
haven't been able to replace yet, I started looking at software that allows
the Mac to run both operating systems. Bootcamp divides the Mac drive in to
both operating systems but you have to completely shut down one operating
system and boot up the other when using it. VM ware creates a virtual drive
so you can flip back and forth using hot keys rather than shutting systems
down before changing. VM ware, if I have it right, has a 30 day freeware
version and I thought I saw 100 dollars to register it but I can't recall
for sure. Anyhow, a friend found software by Oracle called Virtual Box,
spelled as one word, and it is freeware. So far, it seems to be working
fine. When I switch to the virtual drive, windows 7 boots up and while it
is doing that, I turn off the voiceover speech used by the Mac and Eloquence
comes up when Jaws loads. I also can link back to the mac and move software
back and forth when needed. I did all this because my old XP machine is
almost old enough to smoke Marijuana since I live in Colorado where even the
mountains are high. In short, the old computer isn't going to live much
longer so I replaced it with the Mac. How hard is it to change to a Mac
operating system? Well, the Yosemite operating system alone, I think I
read, has about 200 hot keys alone. Then, of course, there are the hot keys
for individual programs, too, so if you learned all the hot keys, you would
be doing great. I got so I could do email after knowing about 25 hot keys
and this included spell checking, looking up words in the dictionary,
opening attachments, switching in and out of mail boxes, and about anything
else I needed to do with email. I figured this would help me learn key
commands I could later use in the word processor on the Mac called Pages. I
was right; they are very much alike so learning the email commands, a dozen
or so commands, jump started me using the word processor. I still have lots
more to learn but at least now I know where to find things, for the most
part, and every day I learn something new helping me gain even more
progress. Anyhow, I thought this might be of help to those thinking about
getting into Macs or who might be struggling now. Yes, it is quite
frustrating those first few days. Fortunately, my wife has been using a Mac
Air for over a year so I got hot key commands from her when first firing up
the machine, haha.
Phil.
K0NX
|