Your friend's computer was already broken. She needs to get it repaired. Your friend's Ibook needs to be diagnosed by someone who knows Macs or doesn't have their head up their butt about the topic of Mac vs. PC but it is obviously non-functional.

I'm not psychically diagnosing it but, I suspect she's run it without a surge protector and something has been zapped. :) At least the don't open another window thing sounds like what happened to my Mom's first IMac - that she bought on E-bay for $50 bucks because she found a Mac Game she liked at a rummage sale... don't ask I don't remember. She just needed a new power supply and a surge protector (she lives in tornado alley - phones get zapped out there). She persists in buying Macs on E-bay or at http://www.smalldog.com/ so she can game online - she's retired. She has a great deal of fun because she just connects and stays connected and chats with hundreds of other retired gaming lunatics - in many multiple windows. I like http://www.smalldog.com for referring people for refurbed stuff - I've had good luck with peripherals and supplies from them.

Other folks:

Where on earth did this bizarre idea that you can't open new windows in Mac or have multiple desktops come from?

I regularly work on my old and new Macs with five or six applications running, multi-chat (Adium now) up and I teach Web-based courses in a variety of different systems including just on my own ordinary Apache Web site.

Some of you who are confused need to keep in mind that the field is not the tractor. The network is your field...it can be heavy clay or lovely loam... that is If I am on slow free community Wifi things I connect to on the Web do so a lot slower than if I'm on a high speed university network or in my decent semi-rural DSL'ed office. That has nothing to do with the machine on the network.

re. Leopard I saw nothing in it that will be useful for me, so I did not upgrade. If it becomes something I need then I'll buy it.

It would have been good if you had said at the beginning that you are speaking to home users. The reason why Vista is turning out to be such a cluster is backward compatibility. OS X is not concerned about old software. If you buy a new Mac, don't try to run your OS 9 software.

For years, businesses running Windows have contracted with development companies to build applications specific to that company. As the Windows OS iterations occurred, they had to be able run those old developed apps. Apple has not been concerned about that. Since Macs are primarily for home users and graphics professionals, the Mac appdev community is really small. Backward compatibility is not much of an issue.

What about the razorblades? What about backward compatability? What about limited software? What about minimal business apps? What about marginal connectivity with devices that dont start with a lowercase 'i'?

Step away from the KoolAid

Many here have used the ridiculous "PCs are for power users and Macs are for Grandmas" argument. Others have used the "I can build a PC that will run circles around the Mac for half the price" argument. Then we get this nugget from the intrepid and eloquent ginmatt: "i've had both macs and pc's. i've never had a virus on my pc. my mac crashed all the time."

Well, if Macs are for Grandmas, and ginmatt couldn't get his Mac to work, what does that make him (no offense to any real grandmothers out there)?

kathygnome preceded ginmatt's White Paper by saying: "This article did nothing but demonstrate the ludicrous lengths Mac owners will go to in order to justify their purchase."

Balderdash. I can speak for every Mac owner I know (counting the 36 I have in current service at my SoCal post-production studio, that would be over 100). To a person, not one of us needs to justify our purchase. In fact, the amount of potential down-time we would have to endure, at $650/hour, would make the purchase and employ of anything but primarily Macs akin to committing financial seppuku.

Aside from the fact that software for PC doesn't exist for much of what we do, even if it did (and yes, it does in some cases), none of us would ever consider using it because the maintenance and potential for down time alone would make it cost-ineffective. Some of the Macs I have in service have been running 24/7 for over 5 years straight - no reboots, no crashes, and only occasional software upgrades. The same cannot be said for any of the 11 PCs I have in service. And I'm a 36-year-old male with an engineering degree; in other words, decidedly not a grandma. Bottom line has a lot more to it than purchase price and resale value. It is also reduced by the simple fact that we don't have to have a full-time (or even part-time) tech on staff.

As absurd as this "argument" is, I never understood why it's considered a bad thing to Mac haters that Macs work right out of the box and require little to no attention once running. Would we not demand the same from virtually any big-ticket item we buy? If a car didn't operate like that, most here would bitch to high heaven. To me, the whole computing experience should be less about the tools and more about the task. After a while, you shouldn't have to think about what brand of computer you are using - it should just disappear into the background.

Finally, this resale-value thing does not really apply to us because we typically get at the very minimum 5 years of use out of our Macs. But this made me think of the whole idea behind car leasing (manufacturers started making better vehicles, meaning they didn't sell as many over time, so they created leasing to get people into new cars more frequently). I wonder if this "length of serviceable life" has anything to do with why PC sales far outpace Mac sales.