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This nice little System Preferences plugin allows you to change some of the bahvior or the mac keyboard. I'm all for getting used to the mac way of doing things, so I don't want to make my keyboard behave just like a pc (which you can do with this program), but I am quite tired of the silly enter key to the right of the spacebar on my laptop. Now it is a much more useful control key.

As a side note, the enter key technically works differently than the return key. In programs such as photoshop, while typing text, return will start a new paragraph while the enter will just move to the next line. Also, the enter key is meant to be in a similar place as the enter key when using the numeric keypad. Still, at the end of the day, I think it is a silly choice. At best it is a rarely used key.

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The first thing I noticed with my laptop was that the mouse acceleration was just plain wrong. I'm used to using windows XP and the mouse movement works great. But with the mac, movement jumps from super slow to super fast. There is no medium speed. Its even more irritating with the scroll wheel because medium speed scrolling is best for scanning a website.

So I started searching around and there are a number of people who have also noticed the problem and done something about it. Here's a more complete explanation of the problem. 

I downloaded the program SteerMouse which installs as a driver. It isn't free, but I'm willing to pay to remove irritation from my life, so I'll probably be a customer if it doesn't cause any problems. But so far, just by installing it thngs are much better. It even seems to have fixed the acceleration of the trackpad.

There's a number of other programs out there. I haven't tried them all. But a search for "os x mouse acceleration" leads to a number of possibilities.