unfamiliar with no fixed taskbar

[morning]

Hi,
Sorry if this is a silly question, but I am thinking about buying a mac tomorrow and I only know how to use a pc. I am used to doing many things at once and being able to use the taskbar at the bottom of the screen to flit between applications or windows. it seems as though you have to minimize the window you are working in in order for it to show up in your dock taskbar. Can you adjust the settings to make each window appear in the taskbar without having to minimize them?
When I opened the internet explorer browser, (no firefox) and opened new windows, I had to minimize them in order to have them represented on the taskbar.
I did see the enable tab option in safari, but this pales in comparison.

[ora]

Macs work very differently in this regard to PCs. In general people use expose to see what is happening in all their windows, or apple-tab between applications. Activate expose with F9 (all windows) of F10 (all windows for one app), though personally i like to bind these to the extra buttons on my mouse.

What you are askign to do isn't possible, you can't have windows both open and also in the dock, but as a piece of advice, it doesn't really help to try and find direct equivalents to ways you worked on a PC when starting out on Mac. Apple use different interface mechanisms, which trust me are very effective, but very different to PC. If you are going to switch you really have to go with it for a while and see how you come to best use your Mac rather than trying to make it imitate a PC.

[Mikuro]

The first thing switchers (or potential switchers) should learn is that that the Dock is not the task bar, and should not be considered an equivalent at all. They're superficially similar, but they really serve different purposes.

Like Ora said, there's Exposé and command-tab ("apple" key = command). There's also a user-definable shortcut for cycling through windows of the active app (by default it's command-`). Also, all applications should have a "Window" menu that lets you switch between windows.

[morning]

Thanks,
And I do respect that it is a different operating system, and that I will of course have to learn to accomplish my tasks within it. I just fear that I am too scattered in my manner of working to keep track of things without an account of everything that is going on at once. I suppose like anything it is hard to visualize the unknown.
And I guess I can't be afraid of changing my ways....

[morning]

Oh, I see here that expose can Display all open windows as thumbnails.
Thanks

[ora]

Yeah, more than that they are 'live thumbnails',so if one is a video it will keep playing when in expose-mode.

[RacerX]

Other aspects about the dock that can be useful for you... by clicking and holding (or ctrl-clicking or right clicking) on an active application's icon in the dock you should get a menu with a list of open windows within that application.

In the case of a browser like Safari or IE, you get the page title as the name of the window in the list.

[knight885]

I was unsure about this, too, but after playing with Expose for a while - just squeezing the mouse to activate it - it becomes second nature.