Teething problems

Hello,

I've just bought a new Mac White, and I'm having a few problems with the basic functions of finder, Sarari, and the trash application. I admit that I've been a windows users for the past ten years, but I'm more open-minded than most people, so please don't just put my problems down to not being able to "convert". I believe the following actions should be able to be made intuitively. So, if you think I'm being stupid, you can tell me, but I'd still really like some input.

Safari: Even though I have wiped all the autofill options in the preferences panel, Safari is autofilling the address bar with my bookmarks. Is there any way of completely turning off autofill?

Trash: Whenever I'm trashing old photos, either securely or non-securely, if the trash app encounters a locked photo, it notifys me that I should press the option key while choosing the empty trash option. However, that's great to know, but then it goes onto stall the application. I forced quit finder twice, the first time it crashed the mac and rebooted itself and the second time it, I had to reboot. The "stop emptying" option just did not work. Common problem?

Finder:
1) I have to rescale the finder window everytime. This is becoming tiresome and I've only had the mac for six days! I know the two ways to resize it, but do I have to do it every time?

2) I can use the left and right arrow keys to navigate through Finder, but I can't navigate into the sidebar. I have to use the touchpad and click onto the sidebar, and after choosing something like applications, click back into the folders so I can use the left and right arrow keys again. Is this normal behaviour?

3) This next one should be made a crime! I have locked a folder and removed all the permissions from it, so it is a drop box only. As one should expect, I don't have access to the folder anymore. However, just to test the security of the folder I searched for files within it using Finder's serach facility and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a list of the "Locked" file's document and photos inside. Whatsmore, I can even click on them to open and view the files. That's not what I call a "secure" folder. Is this a design flaw? Any suggestions or fixes?

Lastly, last night I just couldn't move a folder from my hard disk to a flash drive or any other place for that matter. Can't you cut and paste folders? I had to copy the folder to a different place then delete the original. I have read and write permissions on everything, but I still struggled to do this. Am I going crazy? Tell me you can do this, please!

All thoughts and suggestions are welcome. Thanks, Carl

 

1) Um... Whenever I resize my Finder window and close it, when I open it back up it's the size of which I had resized it to previously.

2) Not that I'm aware of. Not something that bothers me personally, but I guess I could see that as being annoying.

3) so you have two accounts on your mac... I assume you setup an admin account, locked out the files for all users (except for the admin obviously) and then set Everyone to No Access? Only real way for locking everyone out is to CHMOD by command line. You do not have the option to lock out the directory from the owner. That is just silly

I believe locking the folder is there simply to help prevent deleting by accident. But not 100% sure as I've never really used that feature.

Yes, you can copy and paste, but not by keyboard short cut (dunno why... it's dumb).

4) Hrm... odd. Cut no longer works for me?!? Worked in Tiger just fine, but I can no longer get it to activate in finder.

 

Thanks for your reply, hollownail. Your absolutely right when you say it's a bit silly to lock yourself out of a folder, but what I wanted was to test the drop box functionality. I really like the idea. As the administrator of the box I couldn't access the folder as I didn't have enough privileges. No problem! I just wasn't impressed with the "backdoor" way of getting to the files. I believe your right about the real reason for locking folders.

As for the cut and paste issue, it was all about moving documents to my usb. The mac wants to keep a copy of my work. That's cool when I want to keep an original, but when I don't, I will have to delete the original after copying it to the external drive. Within the same harddrive I can move folders with the touchpad and touchpad button no problem.

Thanks again, Carl