So, when you are playing Zak on your old Commodore 64 Machine it is no problem to play with the joystick, and when playing on PC you get the luxury of being able to use a mouse to play. The stupid thing is, when playing on the PC the Mouse is never activated!

YOU ACTIVATE THE MOUSE IN THE PC VERSION BY PRESSING > CTRL + M <

When you are playing the game on a Windows XP OS there is something new out there. You can use the nice ScummVM Tool. With this DOS Emulator the Mouse is always activated and with ScummVM you can also play all SCUMM-based games like Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky, or Simon the Sorcerer, and, and, and ... any other adventure again on your modern Computer! That's cool, eh? You can get the tool there:

http://www.scummvm.org/downloads.php

The controls are based on the already mentioned Scumm Engine, which means Scrip Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion and elevated the textadventures from the stoneage of getting your input by entering the orders letter by letter over the keyboard to the nice and simple Point 'n Click Adventures.
You just click on one of the verbs on the lower half of the screen and then put it together with an item or a person to a complete sentence (well, your english teacher wouldn't call it a sentence, but Zak understands it) and tell Zak what to do,

e.g. pick up + wallpaper
and Zak tears the wallpaper off the wall

or e.g. Use the torn wallpaper with the plastic thing under the desk.

and Zak will pull out his CashCard from under the desk (..how he got it under there I wonder...)

After delivering your first artifact to Annie you can also change the Character you want to play with, and they are all described in the Characters Chapter.