New to osx, any answers to these questions would be helpful

[Anthony8720]

1. I notice a slight increase in noise coming from the harddrive when i scroll through the dock, is this normal?

2. How the heck do i use expose on my 15" pb? I know you are supposed to press F9 but it wont work because it is a function key that is used for something else.

3. The text on this screen seems to be a little soft (ie fuzzy), is there any way to remedy this?

 

[Jay42]

1. Not really sure- it's probably fine. Do you have the magnification effect on?

2. To use the F9 key instead of the turn-keyboard-lighting-down key, you hold the Fn key (bottom left) and press F9. You can remap these keys in the keyboard preference pane as well as the expose pane.

3. Do you mean in a certain app. or just in general? What resolution are you running (look under the display pref. pane).

 

[Anthony8720]

i mean just in general, the text just isn't as sharp as it was on my old crappy dell. I hope this isn't due to the horizontal line issue. I know I have it but i was willing to ignore it since the screen is still better than the 12" with them.

 

[m-dogg]

1. I notice a slight increase in noise coming from the harddrive when i scroll through the dock, is this normal?

2. How the heck do i use expose on my 15" pb? I know you are supposed to press F9 but it wont work because it is a function key that is used for something else.

3. The text on this screen seems to be a little soft (ie fuzzy), is there any way to remedy this?

2 - You can also set one corner of your screen as a hotcorner to enable expose.

I set dashboard to top left, expose to bottom left, and show desktop to bottom right.

 

[Nermal]

3. The text on this screen seems to be a little soft (ie fuzzy), is there any way to remedy this?

Go to Sys Prefs -> Display and ensure that the resolution is set correctly. I think 1440x960 is the recommended res for a 15" PB.

 

[Applespider]

You can choose whether to have the function keys act as Powerbook brightness/volume etc and use the fn key plus f9 for Exposé or you can do it vice versa, hold down the fn key plus whatever for brightness/volume and just plain F9 for Exposé. I came to the conclusion that I used Exposé more than I changed the volume so I did the second.

As far as the fonts/fuzziness goes, the OS X fonts are anti-aliased differently to windows. Having them softer is supposed to be easier on the eyes. I can't recall the rationale behind this but I do notice the difference when I spend a day working at home on the Mac against a day working in the office on Windows. That could be the crap LCD at the office mind you!

 

[mkrishnan]

As far as the fonts/fuzziness goes, the OS X fonts are anti-aliased differently to windows. Having them softer is supposed to be easier on the eyes. I can't recall the rationale behind this but I do notice the difference when I spend a day working at home on the Mac against a day working in the office on Windows. That could be the crap LCD at the office mind you!

Just to second this...try giving it some time. this was very noticeable to me when I first got my iBook, and over time, I have become very used to it, and I do find anti-aliased fonts more pleasing to my eyes. But it took a little while.

Also a ditto to trying to set Exposé to screen corners. I *love love love* this feature.

 

[sk3pt1c]

if it's a new powerbook it's probably those damn lines that make your display hazy and stuff
that's why i'm ordering the 17" in a couple of days

 

[Flynnstone]

Just to second this...try giving it some time. this was very noticeable to me when I first got my iBook, and over time, I have become very used to it, and I do find anti-aliased fonts more pleasing to my eyes. But it took a little while.

Also a ditto to trying to set Exposé to screen corners. I *love love love* this feature.

Ditto for me. (both)

 

[c6viperkiller]

Trying going to the appearance panel in system prefs and changing the font smoothing style to Standard. On my powerbook, when it was on automatic, everything looked way too fuzzy. Hope this helps.

 

[mkrishnan]

Trying going to the appearance panel in system prefs and changing the font smoothing style to Standard. On my powerbook, when it was on automatic, everything looked way too fuzzy. Hope this helps.

In this same pane (Appearance) is an option at the bottom to turn off smoothing of small font sizes. You might increase this number so that less text is smoothed, too...

Good luck! I think after you get settled in, you're going to love OS X.

 

[Anthony8720]

Thanks for the info. I just put my pb next to my pc and couln't imaging that that was a screen defect. I guess i will just have to learn to like the anti aliased fonts.

 

[Spectrum]

I too find the new PB15 text a little soft (despite the higher res). Very odd, and I suspect the horizontal lines as the culprit...

Anyway, If you want to try out without font smoothing - best to use the 3rd party App: Tinker Tool

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11967

I rate it very highly - stable and offers a few other nice features too (like transparent hidden dock items, and a suck rather than a genie effect for minimising windows). Just download and keep it in your Utilities folder.

With Tinker Tool you can turn off font smoothing for fonts up to 144 - overriding most system defaults.

Having said all this. I've actually gone back to font smoothing for everything 10pt and above.

Re: expose - I set : Top left=all windows, Top right=application windows, Bottom left and right=desktop. Dashboard is a useless feature so far IMO.

Thanks for the info. I just put my pb next to my pc and couln't imaging that that was a screen defect. I guess i will just have to learn to like the anti aliased fonts.

 

[Spectrum]

I too find the new PB15 text a little soft (despite the higher res). Very odd, and I suspect the horizontal lines as the culprit...

I'll quote myself and then:

Trying going to the appearance panel in system prefs and changing the font smoothing style to Standard. On my powerbook, when it was on automatic, everything looked way too fuzzy. Hope this helps.

This makes a HUGE difference! I had played around with the different smoothing but couldn't tell the difference (I thought it was very subtle). Now I see that you have to restart applications etc to see the change!

Standard or Light is much better than Auto – or Strong (as I had it on!). It almost feels like I have a new display...

 

[Kernow]

1. I notice a slight increase in noise coming from the harddrive when i scroll through the dock, is this normal?

I used to get this too on my G4 iMac, particularly when magnification is turned on. It also happened when it was doing other graphical tasks like expose or scrolling safari etc. It is perfectly normal and just represents that little extra bit of processing to run the eye candy.

 

[kiwi-in-uk]

2. How the heck do i use expose on my 15" pb? I know you are supposed to press F9 but it wont work because it is a function key that is used for something else.

I use F11 & F12 for Exposé on my 17" PB.

 

[Morn]

>>3. The text on this screen seems to be a little soft (ie fuzzy), is there any way to remedy this?

Yes, font anti-aliasing, or as microsoft calls it, font smoothing. XP has cleartype very comparable to what OSX does. You can stop OSX from doing it with tinkertool google it.