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treegirl

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 7, 2008
5
0
Hello everybody,

I am crying out for advice because I am a complete newbie to Mac, and I was just given a G5 computer. I would like to reinstall OS X and start fresh. The version I have is 10.3.2, and after reading a bunch of posts on this site I am wondering if I should bother with these discs or just buy an upgraded version. One post said you need a mac account. I do not know what that means and if that affects me. There is nothing on this computer that I need, and I cannot get it to stay online with my wireless for more than a couple minutes. I am hoping cleaning it up will help with this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,
Crissy
 
Thank you!

With everybody who responded agreeing, I will follow your advice. Thank you so much.

Peace,
Crissy :)
 
With everybody who responded agreeing, I will follow your advice. Thank you so much.

Peace,
Crissy :)

Crissy,

It's a .mac account. It's Apple sort of Web services plan -- e-mail, some light hosting, some off-site back-up, various things, tied in with their iLife suite of applications -- at about a $100 a year. You don't at all need it, with Leopard or any other version of Mac OS. You need it to do a few things, like use Apple's Backup software, but with Time Machine in Leopard, that is back-up software. Otherwise, save a very, very few trivial things, you can always use the sorts of things .mac provides with other services of your own choosing.

If you want to try it out, there's a 30 or 60 day -- can't remember which -- free trial, with a few limitations. But even then you're under no obligation to keep it. Most people with Macs don't subscribe to .mac

I'd really think about buying the current version of iLife, iLife '08, too. iCal, iTunes, a bunch of stuff comes free with Leopard. But for current versions of iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD -- and GarageBand which some musician hobbyists, even some professional musicians, love -- you need iLife. It's $79, but a steal for all you get.

So, no .mac required. In fact, almost all of those fairly small features of Leopard that are limited to .mac subscribers are for people with *two* Macs.
 
Thanks Sanford

Thanks a lot for the information about the mac acount and about iLife, I had never heard of it. Sounds like with both Leopard and iLife the machine will be really great. Take care.

Crissy
 
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