No Chazz, never experienced either of those issues. Wouldn't Expose or Spaces or whatever it's called solve that second problem by showing all open dialog boxes and/or desktops? Just try hitting F8 if you don't have a dedicated Spaces function key on your pre-Lion keyboard
A handy and comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts:
http://www.danrodney.com/mac/
I could, but that would still be an extra step I shouldn't have to take in the first place. When I'm switching between apps every few seconds to drop content and photography in place the extra time and frustration adds up real fast.
Thanks for the link, I'll run through it and see if I'm missing any.
MAC's are not really more expensive anyway when you figure their reliability into the equation, which is light years ahead of any PC I have ever used.
Something to keep in mind, which often seems to get overlooked in these types of discussions, is the difference between hardware (and even software) standardization between the two platforms. On the Mac side, there is only one company to deal with so everything is pretty well standardized across the board. No matter what Mac one buys, the hardware is (mostly) guaranteed to be top notch and perform the same with everything from an iPhone on up to the Mac Pro. It will stay that way as long as Apple continues to purchase top quality components.
On the PC side there may be more room for competition and flexibility in configuration, but there's also more room for sloppiness, cheapness, and outright rip-offs. Some brands are great, and provide a product of equal or sometimes better quality and longevity. Others can't even be trusted to boot up. As if the multitude of brands wasn't enough, many of them have a distinct separation between their consumer-grade and business class which can often make all the difference.
Great example: I have a pair of business class Dell GX1 workstations built in 1997 currently running as Windows 2003 file servers in my home office. They've never been replaced because they've never skipped a beat. They've only had to be rebooted for upgrades, such as installing gigabit ethernet cards or moving from Server 2000 to Server 2003. One of them even boots off the original 10GB Quantum Fireball hard drive.
Dell chose not to maintain excellence, and these days it's hard to take them seriously. HP's business class products (with the no-bloat option) are arguably the best thing out there on the PC side right now.
Software is no different. Manufacturers love to load up an otherwise extremely stable Windows OS with tons of bloat- and spy-ware, especially at the consumer level. Some companies have bloat-free options in their business offerings (HP comes to mind), and many of the others can simply be wiped and loaded with a vanilla install to regain speed and stability (ASUS comes to mind). Others are simply beyond hope, they may be sleek and have excellent hardware, but the bloat is built right into their proprietary drivers (Sony comes to mind).
What's easiest out of the box? I'd say you're rolling the dice with both. In 3 new Macs purchased over the last 2 years, 2 of them have required a serious investment of time to get working properly (including a complete reinstall or three). Almost all of the Macs I support have required a lot of support time to get simple things like email working just right, and some features I've simply had to give up on and pray for an upgrade. The only thing truly special about Mac is that menu bar stubbornly burning itself into every single Apple monitor since 1984.
Most folks don't realize that I grew up a Mac loyalist, and have switched platforms more times than I can count. Now I use and support all three (*nix) with equal distrust—with the exception of a few hand-built, finely tuned machines in my office.
