I have a pc in the spare room which runs windows. It has Tiscali broadband.. a little box thing that plugs into the telephone socket.

Someone (very kindly) bought me a new laptop.. it's a Macbook because everyone at Uni uses Macs and they seem great so it will tie in with the things I need.

Now don't laugh. I really am not a techie...

I would like to use my laptop in other rooms, and possibly the garden, possibly on trains and certainly in the Uni library, and access the Internet. How do I do this? I was going to ask our local computer-repair man but I think his business has just folded ( ). I asked in John Lewis but they bombarded me (very nicely) with technical information I couldn't take in and held out a box costing £100 or so - is that really necessary?

How do I put Outlook Express on my Mac? Can I?! That's my business email.

I don't know who else to ask!

The broadband box - does it have just 1 socket into which you connect the pc - or is it a router into which you could put cables from more than 1 pc? If it is a router is it also a wireless router ie which could be set up so your macbook could link up from eg another room or the garden. If it's not wireless enabled then the 1st thing would be to get a wireless router sorted out.
As far as mail is concerned you can set the macbook's mail up to receive your business email. I think the mail option would take you through the stages needed to set it up but little point doing that until it can get onto your broadband connection

I have a MacBook and it can be used easily on the wireless (= no wires) wi-fi network.

You could take your macbook today to the Uni Library and the train/cafes and it will automatically detect wireless networks you can use, in top right of the corner of the screen before the clock there will be an icon called airport that you can click on to see which wireless networks are available. For some (most) you need to enter a password (so the network knows you are allowed to use it, for the Uni library they wiill be able to do this for you/show you how ).

To use the macbook in your garden/other rooms without having to plug wires you will need a box to plug into your pc, this box will (when switched on!) allow you to access the web wirelessly via your MacBook. I'm not sure how much the box is but anywhere from £50+ sounds about right. If you can get someone who knows about this to set it up for you it would be easier than trying to do it yourself.

There might be a version of outlook for Mac but I'm not aware of it. Otherwise provided you have the details of the email account you can use something called Mozilla THunderbird (has a similar function to outlook but is opernsource = free and works on all kinds of computer mac/windows/linux) Mozilla also have a web browswer called firefox you might have heard of.

Feel free to message me if this isn't clear

Firstly, the Tiscali box. Does it plug into the network (LAN) port of the PC or USB port? If it's the LAN port you have a router and what you need to plug into that is a wireless access point. If the Tiscali box is going to the USB port I would say it's useless for your requirements - buy a wireless router (less than £50 these days). Your Macbook should already have an "Airport" card installed which will connect to the wireless router. Setting these up isn't rocket science but does need a certain amount of knowledge. Is there an Apple shop close to you? I find them very helpful (knowledgeable too which can come as a surprise to people who normally visit PC World). Actually you could go for an Apple Airport Base Station (which is a wireless router) and this would probably be easier to set up for a mac.

Re Outlook Express. you can download it from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

I've used Outlook Express, Outlook and Thunderbird on the mac but I now stick to the Mail programme which is already loaded. It works very well and integrates nicely with the Spotlight search feature on the mac. Just because your business uses Outlook Express doesn't mean you need to use it for home.

Welcome into the light.

I expect that if you want to stick with using Outlook, you'll find you need to install Windows onto you Mac. Doing this means you can use both OS-X and Windows, depending on which you're more familiar with / find easier. Mail is very similar to Outlook though, and reasonably user friendly. It'll already be on your new Mac someplace.

Re. internet. I have often found that Mac's don't like connecting to internet networks originally set up on a PC, and that the same problem happens in reverse. There is no reason for this to be the case, it just seems to be one of those mysterious computery quirks. It usually does sort itself out eventually though, so if things don't work first time, keep perservering.

No. Outlook Express (not Outlook) is standalone and available for OS X. Outlok (much meatier) is part of MS Office, but that also comes in a mac version.

Router configuration should be identical. I have a home network using a PC, an XP laptop and 2 macs. The only problem I ever came across was to do with which security to use on the wireless network and how to enter the keys. It was actually down to compatibility of the Airport Express and an aged USB wireless adaptor on the even more aged PC.

Install Windows over a Mac

I have had a PC running the network and been ok using a Mac on it, but I guess we all have different experiences

Well you certainly can on the current Intel chipped macs (that was one of the supposed selling points). Using Bootcamp you can select OS X or Windows at startup, or with Parallels loaded you can run OS X and Windows simultaneously (and add a Linux partition too if fancy takes you).

Sorry my post was not about whether you could do it, just that I really wouldn't want to - I love the mac operating system and the way it runs without crashes. (You might guess I'm not a fan of windows! Yuk!)

Personally I think anyone who puts windows on their mac should have it confiscated for cruelty to macs!

I guess I could put a linux partition but as my workstation is linux there isn't the need

Re. the suggestion to run Windows. Outlook Express is horrible (IMO), and Outlook often isn't/hasn't been available with all all releases of MS Office. What I was getting at, is if you like consistancy, and want to use the same software as you have been (i.e. the same edition of Outlook) then installing Windows is the easy solution. Office for Mac has some features that are rather different, not to mention being expensive to buy if you already own Office.

Installing Windows on a Mac, meh, why not? Lets not start the raving-screaming Mac vs. PC debate here. My feeling is that Mac/OSX-only obsessives are some of the most irritating brand snobs on the planet, and flexibility with OS's is better. Not everyone feels that way.

Also, Re. networks. Its also the security bit I have trouble with. I get there in the end, but it takes lots of manual configuration of the security settings. I yet to find someone more friendly with OSX than I am who can show me how to do this on a Mac (most just look a bit bewildered when it doesn't do it all for them!), so I end up setting up the network on the Mac, and then bullying my mainly Windows running computers into talking to it.

Okay, here's where I am..

The pc is definitely not connected to a 'router'. So I'd have to buy that.. I see there are different grades according to whether your house has thick walls so I guess that affects the price.

The macbook does have word, excel, etc but they are the mac versions.. so no windows, which I'm hoping won't be necessary.

The airport thing I'm not sure about - I'll have another look tomorrow (I'm on the pc just now) but I'm sure it doesn't have this. Is this something you buy as a 'card' and where do you put it?

The email - I just want to access my email address inbox from both computers. But I don't even know how to access my business address from a remote computer at all!! I can access my yahoo address from the Uni but not my other address which is the more important one

Oh, and I've just discovered my dictaphone only came with Windows software so I tried uploading the files in itunes and it just came up with a page of gobbledegook.. I hope I don't need a new dictaphone because this one is new and was expensive!

Thanks for all your help - I think I should see if there's an 'Apple' shop in the city But mention OSX, LAN and Linux and I'm completely lost

*hugs* for Lottie.

Sorry, my last post was much more for other people on this thread than addressing your original questions. Certainly don't worry about feeling a little computer-clueless, you aren't any more so than most people. And if I bought a Mac, I would be just as lost. I can use one, I can't fiddle with them.

The visit to the Apple shop is probably your best bet. They have lots of computers out on display, so they can show you there and then the things you'll need to click, and then you can fiddle for yourself. It sounds like you'll be wanting a wireless router, which is a box that plugs into your phoneline and talks through the air to your computers, giving them internet. These generally come with very clear instructions on how to set them up, which means you just plug them in, set a password to stop other people using your router, and they work.

While you're in the Apple shop ask them about setting up Mail so it can check your other email addresses. My boyfriend uses his to check his Uni email, so its definitely possible: I just have no idea how.

As for the dictaphone, its possible that it simply won't be Mac compatible. Lots of software that comes with things like that isn't. Maybe something else to ask the Apple shop people about? Assuming you keep your Windows computer though, you should be able to upload its content to that, and save it in a file your Mac can understand. Not ideal, but a possible solution.

Don't panic, and don't let anyone make you feel stupid. And sorry if I now sound really patronising.

No you don't sound patronising.

Thank you all for the replies - I'm beginning to understand how this will all work.

I'll find out if Aberdeen has an Apple shop ... edited to say: nope! The nearest one is Glasgow.. only 150 miles away. Typical.

(Now I just need to buy a girly pink bag to carry the laptop to Uni..... )

The way it works is that your modem/router connects to the internet and your computer connects to the modem/router. The modem/router supplied by Tiscali is usually a wireless router, so it should be possible to connect to it without a cable to your computer. That is, provided your Mac has Airport, and as it is a recent machine it probably does. (Airport is just the Mac name for what the PC world calls Wi-Fi).

You might still choose to connect the LAN port of your Mac to the modem by cable because a cable connection is much faster. Airport is fast enough for most things (web, eMail, ...), but if you are moving big files from one computer to another it can be rather slow. Also, if the modem needs to be set up for the very first time, or re-configured then connecting the computer by cable might be the only way to talk to it.

There are two parts to configuration. One is to give the modem a username and password that it uses to connect to the Internet Tiscali should have given yo these in their contract letter. If not then you need to phone their support department. The other part of the modem/router work is to set up a wireless network name and password for wireless connection.

Setting up the modem can be done in your web browser. You have to give it the web address of the modem and that leads to some configuration screens. Setting up the wireless network is done partly on the modem/router and partly on the Mac - in System Preferences. BUT Tiscali can give you a disk that automates the whole process. You just run their program and answer a couple of questions and it sets up the whole thing automatically, modem/router AND your Mac. It actually sets up your Mac in a way that it will automatically work with just about any network you connect to, wherever you are. (Technically it uses something called DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol - where it gets all its configuration information from the Router that it connects to)

You can get Outlook Express for Mac or obtain MS Office for the Mac and get the full Outlook program. It is true that Office can be expensive, but if you work for a company that uses Office there is something called the Microsoft Home Worker Scheme where you can buy a copy of Office (includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook) for personal use for £17.50 or thereabouts. Your company provides you with a special code and you can then order the software on a Microsoft Web Site.

There are some severe bugs in Mac Mail which Apple has never bothered to fix. They can make it difficult to set up a second or further account when you have more than one loginable user on a Mac. You need to be quite an IT expert to find the workarounds. So Outlook is not a bad choice as an alternative.

Macs used to use a different processor than PCs, but the most recent Macs use Intel processors, just like PCs. That is why you can now set up a Mac to be dual boot, and to run either Mac OS X or a version of Windows. I think a better way is to always boot up in OS X and if you want to use Windows or other PC software then to run a PC emulation program into which you install your copy of Windows. There are several emulators available and you can get them for older G5 and G4 Macs as well as for the Intel Macs. A good free one is called Q. Commercially there is Virtual PC amongst others.

Emulation is just like having a Windows PC on your Mac desktop. You can run just about any Windows software, you have full access to networking, printers, scanners etc. You can even have several virtual PCs running at the same time, and have them "talking" to each other. But when Windows crashes on one of them you just restart the emulator, and when Windows messes up its own registry and/or software libraries you just restore a copy of a single file and you are up and running again.

As for using your laptop on the move, Airport automatically finds any available networks wherever it is. You can join them by clicking on the Airport symbol and picking one. You may need a password. Some Wi-Fi hot-spots give you free internet access - it will all be done automatically. Other require you to buy time, paying by Credit Card, or by entering an enabling code that you have bought previously. The hotel, cafe or Airport (that is to say a REAL Airport with 'planes - not the Mac kind) generally has good instructions about how to join and use their network.

Usually you will be able to collect mail, but not to send it. That is because outgoing mail goes to something called an SMTP server belonging to the ISP and it only accepts email addresses in its own domain. If you do a lot of eMail on the hoif then the way around this is to subscribe to an SMTP service (SMTP2Go is good). It costs upward of £10 a year. You have to do some reconfiguration of your eMail account to use their SMTP server rather than your ISP's. If you ever need to do it send me a PM and I'll reply with details.

I hope that wasn't too technical.

lottie don't worry about the dictaphone it's quite possible there is an opensource program that will allow you to use it. Once you find someone who has an apple mac you can ask them to look for you.
For example I bought an mp3 audio player that was only officially supported by windows, I thought it would be useless as I only have a mac, but luckily there is some opensource software you can download that allows you to use it on a mac so all is not lost!

No I wasn't actually advocating it, just pointing out that it is possible. I too prefer OS X (speaking as an MS support professional) and have eventually weaned myself off Windows software completely. But as Tamsin points out, if you want to carry on using some Windows based software it isn't actually a moral sin to run Windows on a mac.

A quick further note on Airport (Apple's wireless networking) - Have a look at the icons at the top right of the screen. If there is one like a fan (the type you flutter provocatively not the whizzy electric ones) Airport is installed. If your macbook is recent it WILL be. I wouldn't worry too much about the security issues which Tamsin quite rightly points out, but I do agree with her that it's probably easier to set up wireless networking for a mac and then add PCs if you need to (rather than vice versa).

I agree there can be compatibilty problems with some devices. I think some Olympus dictaphones use a proprietory file system rather than a standard one such as wav or mp3 and the software required to translate this into something useful to a PC or mac is Windows only. Let me know what your dictaphone is and I'll see if I can find a way of getting it to connect.

I was interested to see Mad Tom's comment about bugs in Mail. I can't say I've heard of this (not to deny that bugs may well exist) and I haven't had any problems on my current Macbook with only one account or my old iBook with multiple user accounts and mailboxes. If you just want to send/receive emails it's absolutely fine.

Finally, believe it or not the Apple website has a multitude of readable support documents and guides.
www.apple.com/uk

The OP should look away now.

One problem is that when you add a second account and run Mail for the first time you are forced into a configuration wizard. Part of the configuration is to test the POP3 server by connecting to it. (A crummy design decision in my opinion). The setup will not complete - and you cannot get to the rest of the Mail program until the check succeeds. In some circumstances (not entirely clear) Mail reports that iot cannot connect, and just sits there forever, or until you terminate it.

There have been quite a few posts about this on the Internet. There are all kinds of suggestions - clearing keychains, doing disk repairs etc. ... but no diagnosis/identification of what the real problem is, and no genuine solutions have been posted, and Apple are very quiet about it.

I worked around it by opening a Terminal window and connecting to the POP3 server by telnet, then launching Mail. This tricked it into continuing and I was able to finish the configuration.

Another bug is importing mail boxes when you install a later version of the OS. I went from 10.4 to 10.5 and only a subset of mailboxes was imported. Investigation showed that an interim on-line upgrade had introduced a changed mailbox format. When I upgraded the OS only one of the two formats was imported. But rather than simply leave the other one alone the associated files of the non-imported mailboxes were all deleted. Obviously there is ab bit of code that unconditionally deletes all the old files on the assumption (unchecked, and in this case false) that it had successfully imported everything.

Fortunately I had full backups of my user Library, so I was able to access the mailboxes on another machine, move the mail to new-format mailboxes, and then import successfully.

I greatly prefer Macs to Windows, but I am not deluded that they are in any way perfect, nor that they display better ethics/morals than the big M. For example if you bu a recent iPod it will refuse to interwork with a Mac at any version of OS X 10.3 or earlier. All it needs do is have its file system mounted, and to have files updated from iTunes. This should just be a matter of file system protocol and message exchanges between iTunes and the iPod. It is a totally unnecessary restriction. I suspect a cynical marketing ploy to force otherwise unnecessary 'upgrades'. Of course after the 'upgrade' you find that support ofr OS 9 has been quietly dropped, so the entirely adequate old version of Photoshop and few other handy programs no longer work ...

... and so it goes.

p.s. Mr Pushpull. Can you tell me why MicroSoft decided to destroy thousands and thousands of man years of expertise in what had become an industry standard interface with the release of Office 2007. And what is with the new 4 character filename suffix (docx). That is going to cause pain for many, many organizations.

I was able to get a creative zen mp3 player (doesn't mount as no official support/software for mac) working on a mac using the opensource software xnjb, so using that may enable you to use a new ipod on an older mac os x.

I've never actually used mail, I just access email via web email software which works fine.

I can only say I personally have had no problems with multiple mail accounts or indeed importing mailboxes. I went from Thunderbird on PC to OS X 10.4 then up to 10.5 with no issues. But that's not to say problems don't exist. It's a bit frightening to think that modern airliners are controlled by software when you look at the monumental cockups in some fairly trivial office software.

I agree.

You answered it above I think. Why it isn't possible to open Office 2003 files in Office 2007 without an add on converter is beyond me, though they do have "previous" in that respect (Project being a major culprit for backward non-compatibility). Plus Microsoft, by virtue of their market domination, think that standards are what they write for others to comply with.

HATE HATE HATE

(Sorry, I seem to have been reading Orwell).

It is an Olympus dictaphone - a DS 50. I haven't tried uploading the files onto my pc yet.. or trying to convert them to mac but I have been asked for copies of some of the files I've recorded so I'll need to do that soon and download them to cds to share.

There was a big notice on my studio door today at Uni saying the room now had remote internet connection but although my macbook found the source it still wouldn't run the internet. A fellow student also has the same macbook and we tried in a different room to access the internet via the University Open wireless Network but neither macbook was connecting successfully. Both do have Airport.

I'm afraid most of the rest of this thread has lost me now though.. but I'll give apple's site a look. However I did find the IT support office at Uni so I'll pay them a visit and see if they can help (I ran out of time today).

My main aim now is to access my bt email address from Uni (or anywhere else). At least with Yahoo you just log into yahoo and enter a password and it takes you to the mail programme.

Does anybody have a recommendation for buying a router please?

You don't want a router - especially if you are not interested in the technology. You want a combined modem/router. And it needs to support wireless access. It is much easier to set up a combined modem/router.

Also, as you are with Tiscali, you should buy whatever Tiscali currently recommends, as it will have been well tested with their network, and if you have to call Tiscali support they will be completely familiar with the modem and how to diagnose problems, reset it, reconfigure it, etc.

Tiscali may have a special offer on a modem/router. They may try to tell you that the special prices are for new accounts only but that is not true. They have the discretion to offer them at the special prices to existing account holders too