Mac learning curve

I feel I'm way behind the learning curve on my Mac.

I've just submitted an assignment for Uni which I did on Final Cut Pro 4. Now I have previously mentioned I love Mac software - it's all easy, friendly, cute, cuddly etc. That may be true for any "i" software but FCP is a real bitch. At first it makes no sense. Then after a short while it seems to make sense and you think "Ok, I get it now." You are wrong. You don't get it.

I spent hours just trying to export my FCP project which ran to 13 seconds. This was no Hollywood blockbuster or even a short film for some contest - it was a simple 13 second assignment. I suspect the problems stemmed from the Photoshop file I was using but I can't be sure. FCP help doesn't reveal anything about the error messages I was getting. Neither does the Apple web site. Neither does Google. I managed to get something to spit out through a series of compromises, but I was not happy.

The second part of this rant regards not FCP, but my Mac (A dual 1ghz G4 with 1gig ram). I think there is something amiss with my mac. I don't really know because I don't have enough experience with macs. I'm too used to Windows. The mac seems slow. I've spoken to a few people who might know but they seem unfazed by my accounts of slow speeds. Everyone thinks there computer is slow. On the weekend it took well over ten minutes to burn a 480meg cd. I didn't time it, but I wish I had. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong. I drag the files to the cd icon. It then takes quite a few minutes to "copy" them to the disk. I then drag the disk to the trash/eject/burn icon and it then takes quite a few more minutes to burn the sucker. What the #*$% is it doing in that first "copy" faze?

Also the two internal 80gb HDD's seem slow. If I copy stuff off a data DVD it can take hours. If this was a pc, I'd know where to look but with a mac and don't know where to begin. This, combined with the fact I'm too busy/lazy to learn at this stuff at the moment, means I'm well behind the mac learning curve.