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New Mac User...

A

ajcannon

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Wow, I am impressed. I ordered my Mac Mini a couple of weeks ago and I got an email yesterday morning saying that it had shipped from China. It arrived at my house in Columbia, SC in less than 24 hours from the time that I received the notice of shipping. It just arrived and I am about to set it up now. I have been a PC user for years and have honestly never really used a Mac before. What are some things that I need to know and some things that I need to look out for? Any software that I must have? THanks for all of your help - I am sure that I will be back to ask many more questions shortly.

-Andrew
 
ajcannon, congrats!
Just have fun with the iLife apps. and I'm sure from there you'll have plenty of Q's for everyone along with the "fun" part that may have been missing 🙂
 
congrats on your purchase! hopefully your mac will give you a new fun experience that you'll want to share it with your friends and family!

one piece of advice i can give you is that windows media player for os x is terrible, if you want to decode anything pre-windows media 7 use mplayer osx or VLC. download it at www.macupdate.com or www.versiontracker.com.

people on this forum can be really helpful but they can also be very rude if you don't do a search first. so try doing a search beforehand. other than that, enjoy your os x experience!
 
There are a couple of good sites for downloading freeware/shareware that you might want to check out:

http://www.macupdate.com/

http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/

They're very similar in content, so it's kind of a preference thing. But there are definitely some cool "toys" to play with, such as:

- WeatherPop, which displays the weather for different cities in your menu bar

- MenuMeters, which displays various system-related information in your menu bar

and many more. I'd encourage you to explore for fun things. There are also a couple of threads on "must have applications" for OS X around here if you do a search.

Welcome to Mac!

Edit: Sheesh we're helpful. And fast. Everything I said was already covered! I guess I'm a slow typer.
 
Thanks for your help. I am in class right now and I cant wait to get out to start playing with my new mac. I'll search, and then post more questions if I cant find the answers before hand. Thanks in advance.

-Andrew
 
I guess apple was certainly right in their decision to make the mini. We've had a flurry of new converts posting on here since the announcement, all running mini's as their first macs.

Congrats! You won't be disappointed!
 
Congrats on the mini! i also have one. A great thing about Macs is they come with just about everything you need. By the way your just a stones throw away from Beaufort. Our kids live in Columbia. Anyways this is the place to ask questions so welcome.
 
Dont Hurt Me said:
By the way your just a stones throw away from Beaufort. Our kids live in Columbia. Anyways this is the place to ask questions so welcome.
Click to expand...

Beaufort is a beautiful place and I get down there every chance that I get. I am a student at USC right now, originally from Florence. Anyways, thanks again to everyone for your help. I am looking forward to using the Mac Mini more and more, and I will likely replace my Gateway laptop when the new PowerBook G5 comes out (whenever that may be - I am not in a hurry at all since my Gateway is only a couple of months old). Have a great weekend everyone!

-Andrew
 
Welcome to the light side of computing!

Linkety to a thread I made that may help you here on the forums.

Did you upgrade the RAM? That is something that is very important to do on Macs... (but 3rd party RAM is cheaper and not at all hard to install)
 
Here's a little article about switching that you might find useful. The best thing to do though is just to play around and get a feel for the OS, it's amazing how quickly you can pick it up. Enjoy! 🙂
 
Congratulations on your mini purchase. You have a ton of software already installed on your machine. Check out the untilities folder. Use the Disk Utility to repair permissions. I always have the activity monitor open to see what my machine is doing. Grab us a great utility for taking screen shots/

I this photoshop elements is a must have although you can try to get by with iPhoto for editing
 
Mechcozmo said:
Did you upgrade the RAM? That is something that is very important to do on Macs... (but 3rd party RAM is cheaper and not at all hard to install)
Click to expand...

I bought the 1.42GHz model with a gig of Ram, internaly bluetooth and airport. I didnt get the superdrive because I already have an external 16x dual-layer DVD burner for my laptop and it is Mac compatable so I will just use that when I need to, although I still havent used it once for my PC. Honestly, most of what I do is on the internet. I am an eBay Powerseller and most of the things that I use my computer for are online applications that will work with both PC and Mac, but I really appreciate all of the suggestions made here. I had to leave to go out of town shortly after I got out of classes yesterday so I still havent had but about 10 minutes of time on the Mini. I will be sure to post more questions as they come along, but until then, thanks for everyones help.

-Andrew
 
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