New to Mac's, A little help please?

[dissonation]

Well, I finally made the switch, I've been thinking about it for ages and 2 nights ago windows BSOD'd on me for the last time. I picked up an emac yesterday (yes, im poor) stuck in mt 1GB DDR from my PC and a 160GB HDD and I've never been so impressed, well, I probably have but I'm just ranting now...

Anywho... I have a few issues which I'm sure are solveable, I'm just being dumb...

1) Copying backed up files from a CDROM, I copy them over and they're read only by default, I select the directory and make it read/writeable by me but it does not change the attributes for the files and sub directorys contained in the folder, anyway of doing this other than sitting and doing it folder by folder?

2) What are the equivilant keys for 'End' and 'Home' on a pc?

3) How do I format my external 80GB drive to MAC FS (whatever it is)? Its FAT32 at present, but I'd like to just start it over mac styleee

4) I miss nero, what can I use instead? Toast?

5) On my PC I had MSN Messenger and Plus, puerly so I could rename my contacts, is there anyway to do this on MSN Messenger for Mac?

Thats all that I can think of, thank you soooooooo much in advance.

joe

[dissonation]

oooo, what are the keyboard shortcuts for back and forward in finder and firefox, so i can map them to my back/forward buttons on my mousie

[.....]

1) No idea, haven't had that problem.

2) Command Up/Down is home/end in some apps. (or the keys to the left of the page up/down keys ;))

Command Left/Right is back/forward.

3) Disk Utility (found in apps/utilities/) should do the job.

4) I haven't had anything to burn that needed anything more than the included software, but I presume Toast is what you're looking for.

5) I don't think there's a way to do that. (with the official client anyway)

[m!ke]

my answers

1. Ive never actually had a problem with that. all i know is that theres gonna be an automater tool when tiger is released which in theory im guessing, should do that automatically.

2. last time i checked the home and end keys were the same... as for firefox you can follow THIS LINK

3. you can format drives by using the disk utillity, which is.. simple enough, in the utilities folder in your apps.

4. Toast is a great program imo. just drag whatever onto it and click burn.

5. Theres several msn clients for mac which offer more features than the official version. infact you may want to find and try them all. I know amsn has some nice features like display pictures and whatnot.

[dissonation]

Thanks thats it all sorted apart from my first question... It's really bugging me, it'll take me hours to go through all the directories changing the attributes

is there a console command i could use

like attrib tree *.* or somthing more mac like

[nexionly]

three good msn clients for mac, i love the first one.

http://adiumx.com/

http://amsn.sourceforge.net/

http://mercury.to/

[fuzzy_logic]

Thanks thats it all sorted apart from my first question... It's really bugging me, it'll take me hours to go through all the directories changing the attributes

is there a console command i could use

like attrib tree *.* or somthing more mac like

585304393[/snapback]

I think you can choose the folder that contains all the backed files, right-click and choose "Get Info". Make changes to the permission and then choose "Apply to enclosed items". I've never tried it before but it shoudl work.