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Clarification

J

Jaygoy18

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 13, 2006
1
0
I plan upon buying my first MacBook (well, first Mac anything really) as was wondering if some of you could answer a few questions for me...

  • One of the big reasons I'm buying a MacBook is so I can write where ever I am. I've heard about a few good freewares, but I was wondering what you guys think is the best freeware.
  • I know you need to download a driver to be able to use an XBox 360 controller with a Mac. Will I be able to use one with my MacBook?
  • What the hell is a driver anyways. I'm rather green when it comes to technological terms.

Thanks a bunch in advance.

P.S - I know I'm a new poster and all, but please don't give me the 'cold shoulder.' I help run a forum over at bbb.net and I know how it is; ignore the new guy.
 
On writing: what kind of stuff do you want to write? Many people are even happy with the built-in TextEdit and Stickies.

A device driver is just a little program that knows how to talk with a particular piece of hardware on one end, and passes that information back to the operating system on the other end. The xbox driver comes as an installer that you download and run once, that will add an icon to the Mac's System Preferences. For ref, you get that here.
 
Firstly, drivers help your computer recognise (and use) a piece of hardware it would normally be unfamiliar with. I'd say Windows XP users generally have
to worry more about drivers than Mac users do. I don't ever remembering dealing with a driver issue on a Mac, but I don't install loads of weird stuff.

If you want to write, MS Word is good (I know many of you will disagree). If you're writing scientific articles or something, then TeXShop will help you write in LaTeX. OpenOffice is an application that's similar to Windows, and it's free. You may need our help installing it though. NeoOffice is very similar, but it's not free and will likely be easy to install.

Um.....then there's "Pages", which is a Mac application. I don't really think of it as a general document writer, but many people here will disagree with me.
 
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