Mac users guide to Windows

Man, kids, alone one today, this is Mac vs. PC video right here. I had my PC displayed on the screen. You can see with PC, um, there's something called the Start menu. When you click the Start button, it opens the Start menu. As your most recently used applications go into all programs, you can open Control Panel or My Documents or anything, log off and shut down something.

In Windows, there's a secure keystroke that will always work: press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to bring up Windows Security. There, you can open Task Manager, lock the computer, log off, shut down, or change your password. You show your Task Manager; this displays all the applications running, whether they're responding or not, and all the processes.

On the side, it's called Explorer. Explorer is your Start menu and your icons, just like binders, just your icons. We're going to kill Explorer now. I have nothing; it's just this window. This window closes, and now I really have nothing, but Ctrl + Alt + Delete always works. At least I get my Windows Security screen. I can lock the computer, then press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to take my password, and now no Explorer still.

So, I have to go into Task Manager, File, New Task, and type explore, and now everything is back. There's something sort of like the dock. Right-click on the envious taskbar with the Start button and stuff, click Properties. You can show Quick Launch Bar. Now, you saw an error when doing this; that's because a bunch of applications fail on Windows a lot.

You can actually see some applications that are running right here. This bar has a bunch of icons that can bring up a bubble at any time, and it has the time on it. That's called the system tray. Something similar on the Mac, if you look right here, you know, all these icons, time, etc.

Um, so yeah, another thing you'll notice is the Recycling Bin. When you double-click the Recycling Bin, it will open an Explorer window, and from the Explorer window, you can right-click and then go down to arrange by etc. Say we want to create a new document on our desktop; you would just right-click on our desktop, go to New, and you can make a new Zip folder or file, new Excel, new text document, new shortcut, or new folder.

Let’s just make a new folder named "Hut 123," and then we can actually change the icon of our folder by right-clicking and going into Properties, Customize, Change Icon. We can change it to be whatever we want; I'll make it look like a lock. It's pretty lame. Anyway, then we can open it up; it opens up an Explorer window, and then new document, etc.

There’s something in the Start menu called Control Panel right there, which is like System Preferences in a way. You can set user accounts, anything you want to know, search, help, or anything like that. Nothing easy. Let's just throw this out in the Recycling Bin; see the big get some trash in it. Right-click and click empty; makes a little sound when you empty your trash. You might not have heard it, but um, so this is almost like the dock.

Open Firefox; let's just drag this. Yep, okay, now this is a great example of a crappy program. See, my computer, my Windows box froze for a few seconds there; that's because Windows is poor at threading. So, I'm going to send the Ctrl + Alt + Delete, and let's take a look at Task Manager.

You have to do this almost constantly. Take a look at CPU right here; something called System Idle Process is taking up most of my CPU. What the hell is System Idle Process? So Windows, they can't kill it. Actually, if we do kill it, my computer will go to half, so let's not do that.

Most of the time, something stops responding while you're using it. Like Firefox: if you just kill Firefox, that issue goes away. It's like safety in case something bad happens. Another thing that's better on PCs is you can lock the computer. There's no Apple key or anything to close the window; you press Alt + F4, and there’s no terminal or anything because Windows is not based on Unix like the Mac is.

But we can lock the computer at least, so now no one can touch my computer unless they can press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and know my password. Now we have—we can—I’ll just show you Command Prompt, because instead of being based on Unix, Windows is based on DOS. So, let’s just take a look. This is sort of like terminal, except instead of ls, it's dir; make their still applies, cd still applies, etc.

Actually, I've got Anu on this, so ls does work. I worked really hard to make ls work; don't ask me how I did it. Then you exit, close. So, that's Windows. Now, let's do a little Mac comparison.

Okay, so on the Mac, I have your desktop, have your dock; that's where most of your programs go. You can only open a program once. Say we open Firefox, and then we have something else running. Click Firefox, and instead of opening again, it just opens this crap thing.

When we run something, that always goes into the dock. We minimize something; it goes into the dock. Everything's more oriented around the dock now. Same folder system, everything. Most of you are to use Macs.

The one thing about PCs that really isn’t good is that things just stop working too often. Now, on the Mac, it's easy to make things start working again; just go into Force Quit, and you can kill them. Simple as that. I don't have to find their name in some weird process list.

So, um, yeah, it's a short little Mac vs. PC video, and a life, a short goodbye.