overall help

[carcha]

I've had a mac for ever and now have a older power pc gr osx 10.5. I left it for some people to use for about a month and a half and now I have all sorts of stuff, applications and tons of things I don't know what it is. I try to open but it will say it can't or it's coded. I cant get searchlight to find much of anything nor finder. I think my hard drive was divided into two parts if that's possible. I mean when I use to open it only showed Power Mac G4 now it has that plus mac owner power mac g4. Entourage, word, excell, nor office will open anymore. It seems as if things have been hidden and my usage compromised. How can I LOOK into my computer and see whats there and get rid of things that they may have on it. I dont know anything about tech stuff but I would like to learn a few tricks. It looks as if they used entourage. Whats eudora, svg viewer, com.apple.driver, ata bus, vnc guest, ?. It says I have a net bios name???? Some things are listed backwards like com.apple. On favorites (which allows me to see it but not open is Safari 1 through safari 9) It goes on and on. If there is any advice you can give to look INTO my computer I would so very much appriciate it.
Thank you

 

[eljanitor]

If you don't care about whats on the computer, and you want to solve it quickly and easily.

a1) Back up what you want onto another drive then:
1) Take the factory instal CD/ DVD and put it in the Drive.
2) Restart the Mac holding down the "C " key so it boots from the Disc.

Then go here and follow the steps for "Erase and Instal":

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1544

This will bring your Mac back to factory specs, and will remove all third party software.

You may have to use the disk utility on the installation disc to remove the partitions someone created, if you want them gone.

Disk utility info can be found here:http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh14.html

Hope this helps.

 

[carcha]

overall help

I bought the mac used a few years back and it didnt come with any discs. I hate to just start deleting since I have no idea if these things are of any importance. Is it possible to divide the hard drive or use different servers...I'm not sure what I'm even asking but there is so much stuff on my computer and I can't open hardly any. Like I said if I try I most often get some text crap or something encoded.....there has to be a way to see what they did isnt there?????

 

[eljanitor]

The clean install is the easiest way to solve all of that, otherwise you're looking at allot of time and effort to hope and try to get it back to normal.

One thing you can do if you have Administrative rights is to create a new user account, and delete the others. That will solve some of these issues.

To create a new user account: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8235.html