Hello everyone. I decided to take the plunge after years of PC use and months of perusing the mac store and mac websites. I settled on a Panther G4 Powerbook, 1 gig ram, 15" screen. I need help with these problems:

1. My keyboard on my laptop stopped working around the time I plugged in my USB graphire2 stylus pad and wireless pen. The light that brightens up the keyboard in dark conditions still works fine, it's just my keyboard doesn't respond at all. Anyone have a solution for this before I take it down to the shop?

2. Sometimes when I drag my disk icon from my desktop onto the trash/eject icon in the dock, the disk icon disappears but the disk doesn't eject from the Superdrive and I can't eject the disk in any other way unless I reboot Panther. Anyone know why this is and how to solve it?

3. In Finder, I can't drag any contents from a CD-RW into folders on my HD. I can do this in Winxp using Explorer. How can I do this with Panther?

Other than these problems, Mac is definately beautiful and an eye candied alternative to drab PCs. It's just my ignorance about Macs at this stage that is causing some mild frustration over some problems I have with the OS, I will post these other problems when I come across them again. Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Sometimes I have a problem where my Kensington USB keyboard stops responding. The only way to fix this is either to reboot or to unplug and replug in the USB cable. However, keep in mind I'm not using a real Apple Pro Keyboard - it's a Kensington one.

Also, Mac OS X is unix based ... which means that on top of the nice GUI you're really dealing with BSD/Unix where all drives and disks (filesystems) must be mounted and unmounted (to work with them and to eject them). If ejecting the disk through the GUI doesn't work for you, try the "umount" terminal command. Note that all mounted filesystems appear under the /Volumes/ directory. Note you may need to use a Terminal to get there.

Okay, so this is a quick unix lesson ... the Terminal app is accessible by going to the Applications folder and then into Utilities. The "cd" command, just like in DOS, allows you to switch directories. The "ls" command is the Unix equivalent of the DOS "dir" command to list the contents of a directory.

Check out the TechTutorials forum for some more Unix commands

Thanks for the help. I will definately try the unix commands. Unplugging and replugging the USB still doesn't make my keyboard respond. Is there any other trick that might get it working again? And do you have an answer for question #3? Thanks again for your help.

Strange problems. For me these work just fine (question 2 AND 3). For question 1 I would check that the device is truly compatible with Mac etc. And I wouldn't mess around with terminal commands. If you aren't a techie you will just end up in big troubles because you can give very powerful commands in there...

Welcome to the Apple world. I have no problems whatsoever and love my Panther laptop

-Powerbook 12, 1Ghz, 768MB, 60BG, Bluetooth, Airport Extreme-