Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

appendix a: the “where’d it go?” dictionary 485

Disks

Working with disks is very different on the Mac. Every disk inside, or attached to, a

Macintosh is represented on the screen by an icon. Mac OS X does have something

like the My Computer window (choose GoÆComputer), but both the icons on

the desktop and the icons in the Computer window reflect only the disks currently

inserted in your Mac. You’ll never see an icon for an empty drive, as you do on Win-

dows, and there’s no such thing as drive letters (because the Mac refers to disks, not

to drives—and refers to them by name).

Display Control Panel

The functions of the Windows Display Control Panel lurk in the Mac OS X System

Preferences program—just not all in one place. You set a desktop picture and choose

a screen saver using the Desktop & Screen Saver pane, and adjust your monitor set-

tings using the Displays pane. (Mac OS X offers no equivalent to the Appearance tab

in Windows, for changing the system-wide look of your computer.)

DLL Files

The Macintosh equivalent of DLL files—shared libraries of programming code—are

invisible and off-limits. As a result, no Macintosh user ever experiences DLL conflicts

or out-of-date DLL files.

DOS Prompt

There’s a command line in Mac OS X, but it’s Unix, not DOS. See page 457.

Drivers

See “Add or Remove Programs.”

End Task Dialog Box

If some Macintosh program is hung or frozen, you escape it pretty ...