It has just been over a year since I got the mac mini.  I haven’t used it every day but I have gotten to the point where I am using it more than my old Windows XP machine.  I have Windows 7 installed as a parallel drive on the mac mini but I have just used it a couple of times learning how to boot up Windows while the Mac is running.  You have to press some hot keys to boot up Windows 7, use more hot keys to turn the mac voiceover speech off, and then jaws and windows boots up.  You can then hot key back and forth as you desire from windows to the mac with both programs running at the same time on the same hard drive.  Anyhow, I have been using spell check, of course, on the mac but it took a little getting used to at first.  It corrects your spelling on the fly as you type.  A burble  or bubbling sounds when it corrects the word on the fly.  If it cannot find a replacement word, it pops up with several choices you can pick from.  You hit a hot key on the word you want, and it exchanges the words.  You can open a dictionary or thesaurus, turn on the grammar checker, tell the mac to add this word to the spell checker, such as a last name the obviously is going to show up as a misspelled word, or a number of other choices.  I am using the text editor, Pages, which is the Mac’s version of MS Word for word processing, and of course, the same commands are used in the spell checker.  If the dogs aren’t barking, or heavy trucks aren’t passing by our busy street, along with fire trucks and police cars, or if Beaky isn’t out doing his routines, or my radio is turned up, or my son in law isn’t passing by and honking his big truck boating horn he installed that sounds about like an ocean liner passing by, I tap a couple of hot keys and dictate into the microphone whatever I want.  I’ve used it a number of times but prefer typing due to the afore mentioned sounds interrupting my dictation.  But, as I was saying, this form of spell checker has really gotten me to the point I really enjoy using it and it is saving me time trying to find words in a dictionary and such as that as I type.  You can turn all the spell checker features, including the grammar checker features, off and on as you wish, too, so that allows you to customize the program to your liking.  Now, I wonder how many mistakes I made in this message.

Phil.