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Topic: 5 essential Mac behavior mods for Windows users

A lot of people in the last twelve to six month have taken the plunge and switched over to Macs, rather than making their new systems pure PCs. Unfortunately once you've made that move though you find all these little quirks that are really annoying when you're familiar with Windows. Things like keys being completely different to what you'd expect, or the mouse not behaving quite right.

I've been using an iMac since May now, so I've had to find solutions to many of the annoyances. Here's a list which I've found essential.

1. USB Overdrive.
For some reason under Mac OSX, the mouse movement just feels slow and unresponsive. USB Overdrive fixes all that, and now feels like it seems it should. It also allows you to do things like change the mouse acceleration rate and button behaviour, along with defining shortcut keys if you want them.

2. DoubleCommand.
Under Mac OSX, it took me ages to figure out why the 'home' and 'end' keys weren't doing what I expected. It turns out you have to use command+left/command+right to get the equivelant behaviour, to get to the start or end of a line. You can rebind those keys though using DoubleCommand, taking some pain out of migrating.

3. Perian.
Frustrating as hell is the fact that QuickTime only has basic MOV and AVI support. Sure there's VLC, but that won't do when you want to use FrontRow, which relies on QuickTime. If you want DivX, Xvid, 3ivx or support for anything similar, you'll need a plugin. Perian handles all that nicely, allowing you to play all your encoded videos in those not-quite-accepted-standard formats.
In fairness you'd typically need something like the ffdshow codec pack to do this under Windows, but it's basically a requirement on all my systems anyway.

4. Deep Sleep.
This one's a dashboard widget, which allows you to put the system into hibernate mode. For those who don't know what this is, it means that rather than putting the system to sleep and only storing the current state in RAM, running it on minimal battery power, it instead writes that data to the HDD, and allows you to entirely switch the system off.

5. Parallels.
Okay, maybe this one isn't quite fair to be in this category. But when you're moving from Windows to a Mac, let's face it, you can't get everything you can for Windows. Some things you just can't afford to use alternatives for, for whatever reason as well - for instance, an application might have its own data file format which no Mac applications can read or write.
Parallels allows you to basically run Windows On your Mac - simultaneously. I would be recommending 2GB in the Mac to do this, but it's definitely a very important app.
Some applications might be able to be used by just using Crossover , but it's well known that some apps aren't quite compatible yet.

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