While I love Alexe, my macbook, I have to admit that I do have some issues with being a Mac owner, since I’ve been a PC user ever since I became computer-literate and have never even touched a Mac before I bought her. I have had to adjust a lot. Like on my keyboard, the backspace and delete button is just one and it is only a backspace function. There is only one button on the touchpad, only for left click. If I want to right click, I have to press the control button + left click. To use the CTRL function like the PC (for example, CTRL+C for copy), I have to use the COMMAND button instead which is located right next to the spacebar key which is where the ALT key is located on a PC. It gets really confusing when you use a PC in the office and you end up pressing ALT+V to paste and wonder why nothing happens. I also thought that it was a pain that it did not have a printscreen button until I found this article that explained how to take screenshots with a Mac.
I have some software saved in my hard drive that won’t work on a Mac. And I couldn’t even save new files on my hard drive because Alexe only had read access to it. Then I found this site that explained the problem and offered the best solution. Apparently, my hard drive is NTFS formatted and could not be written on by anything non-Windows. The solution is to reformat it to FAT so that both Windows and Mac can read-write it. If I did that, though, all my files would get lost. Thank goodness my hard drive was split into two partitions, so I reformatted only one partition and kept the other one with all its files intact. How I did so:
Go to Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) and click on your drive on the left hand side. Click the erase tab and select what format you would like from the drop down menu. OS X can format a drive to FAT32 so you won’t need to do it from a Windows computer. FAT32 will allow you to use the drive with either a Mac or a Windows PC, but there are some restrictions, such as files larger than (I think) 2 GB in size cannot be copied to a FAT32 drive. If you are only going to be using this drive with your Mac, then format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will give you full usage with your Mac but will not be readable by Windows.
