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New to Mac, just purchased a Macbook Pro

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Original poster
Jan 27, 2008
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Dear all,

After years of waiting and of course getting the funds i purchased a 15" Macbook Pro on Friday.

It was the 2.2ghz i7 quadcore, thought id spend the extra as i am not going to purchase a Laptop again in the next 6 years.

Just awaiting it's delivery.

Had a few questions otherwise,

I am new to Mac what is the transition like as such...

I got the 500gb hard drive is this a much better choice than the 750gb?

I'm looking for programmes that i usually use on my PC e.g. Burning Software, Office Suite, Youtube video extractor, Dvd Ripper and video converter, Pdf viewer.

I wanted to know can Keynote be installed by itself or does the whole iwork's package have to be installed as such?

Also i am looking at learning how to make video presentations any simple basic suggestions?

Also i have an external hard drive can i connect this up to my Mac and transfer my data, or will it ask me to format my disk?

Also i am thinking of putting Windows on in the future what is the best programme to use?

Regarding Microsoft Office which one is better? Office 2008 or Office 2011

Sorry for so many of the questions,

Regards
 
Last edited:
Congratulations on your new MBP! I'm thinking about getting the same thing. I'm pretty new to Macs myself but am so glad I switched.

I think the 500 GB drive is 7200 RPM, right? Sorry I can't tell you how much faster that will seem in real life, but it's got more space than my iMac does (320 GB)!

For office software, I have iWork '08 and OpenOffice.org installed but I don't use them alot.

The few times I download a video from YouTube, I use the "DownloadHelper" add-on for Firefox. (I still use Firefox instead of Safari because I *love* the "Adblock Plus" ad blocker and don't believe anything in Safari blocks ads as well. Plus I'm used to Firefox.)

DVD Ripper -- is that what Handbrake does? Seems like everybody but me use it!

You don't really need a pdf viewer -- OS X's built-in Preview app is great at it, and fast.

You can connect your external disk to your new Mac and I don't think it'll ask you to format it. What format is it in? OS X can *read* FAT, exFAT, and NTFS, but can only (natively) write to FAT (well, and Mac OS formats, of course). If you only need to read files off of the disk, you should have no problem.

To run Windows, you have to decide to run it in Boot Camp or run it in a virtual machine (e.g., Parallels, Vmware Fusion, VirtualBox, etc.). It depends upon what you're going run while in Windows. Either way, you'll need a valid installation copy of Windows XP or Windows 7 (I'm assuming no one would willingly use Vista).

If you want Windows to play games, you'll almost certainly want to install it via Boot Camp. This requires an extra partition on your boot drive, and you must re-boot into Windows to use it, but once booted it runs "natively" on the machine and all? almost all? games work.

If you want to run office apps or something, a virtual machine approach is more convenient (once you get it set up) because you don't have to leave OS X. Most windows apps will run fine this way, but games seem to put too much demand on the graphics drivers and rarely work. The paid products have free trial periods so you can try the out with the apps you're interested in, and VirtualBox is free.

Can't tell you which Microsoft Office is better, but my understanding is that the Mac versions run quite well. Better research that, though.

Good luck, enjoy!

Regards,
Brian33
 
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