It’s very difficult for someone used to a Windows computer to acclimate to a Mac. I strongly recommend against it for an older user who’s not so up on computers.
Incidentally, because of work, I switched to a Mac about a year ago and I have gotten very used to it, but it was a tough transition. My wife absolutely hates it. The only reason Macs don’t get viruses is that virus-makers want to do the most damage they can for the least effort, and Windows machines greatly outnumber Macs. As Macs have gotten more popular, they’ve gotten more viruses. I’ve never had one, but then I never had one on a Windows machine, either.
Windows Vista bombed because its hardware requirements pushed the limits of what was available. Windows 7 is more scalable, and stopped the trend of continually upping the ante of the hardware needed to run it. Get yourself a good Windows 7 machine. Anti-virals are built in; just make sure you update them and stay away from sites that offer porn or pirated material.
can you explain further about the differences?
Sorry, no, you are wrong. There ARE NO Mac OSX self-installing, self-transmitting, self-replicating viruses int he wild. Period. Zero. Nada. Zilch. and that is after eleven years of exposure. There were seven proof-of-concept, never-seen-out-of-the-lab virus candidate wanna be's that made head lines, all of which failed to work because there are no viable vectors on a Mac for them to spread... and each of them required the participation of the user to install, transmit, or run, making them at best Trojans. As for said Trojans, there are now 18 known Mac OSX Trojans in five Trojan families that OSX itself will warn you if you attempt to download, install, or run. That's it.
Compare that to the almost 2 million malware for that other platform.
??????
We Mac users still await our first true virus. The rare bits of malware cooked up for Macs have been trojans.
Macs are inherently more secure than XP. I'm not a bit experience with 7 so I won't comment on that OS.
It was quite easy for me. The interface is quite intuitive, of course it was designed that way from the beginning. My biggest problem was learning new keyboard shortcuts. People report quite good results handing the elderly a Mac and having them up and running with minimal instruction.
The only reason Macs don’t get viruses is that virus-makers want to do the most damage they can for the least effort
Well, there is the hardened UNIX architecture. There are 50 million Macs on the market, most without any protection. That's a big, juicy target, especially considering that the demographic tends twoards people with more money to steal from. So far the most we've seen in the wild is the rare trojan that requires an admin password to install. Almost everything else has been in the lab, usually by created by those trying to sell antivirus products.
Windows Vista bombed because its hardware requirements pushed the limits of what was available.
Vista bombed because it sucked. The development effort was plagued by mismanagement and changing scope so much that it had to be suspended and eventually restarted from scratch near the end. The bloated hardware requirements were just an effect of the core problem, and exacerbated by pressure from Intel and poor advertising strategy. Another was trying to tack on Mac-style security to a very poorly designed and factored security system, which resulted in UAC popping up every other time you clicked on something. One example going back before XP, if you want to prevent someone from changing the clock, you also prevent him from opening the clock at all, because the entire thing was under one privilege set. Mark Russinovich's complete refactoring of the whole security system is one of the reasons Windows 7 is so much less annoying, almost Mac-like.
. Windows 7 is more scalable, and stopped the trend of continually upping the ante of the hardware needed to run it.
As an example of how bad Vista was, Windows 7 will run well on hardware that would have had Vista crawling. When people with a Vista machine ask what they can buy to make their computer faster, my first suggestion is usually to wipe it and install Windows 7.
Do you really think it’s that difficult for someone used to Windows to get used to a Mac? I’ve only ever had PCs until I got my Mac last fall. I’m older (that’s ALL I’m sayin’ about that!) and it took me about 3 days and I was pretty comfortable. Occasionally I still have problems (mostly little things like with photoshop, but it’s not anything that’s a big problem—mostly because I have a few coordination problems which are peculiar to me).