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What to do when I get 12" iBook

VanMac

VanMac

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 26, 2005
914
0
Rampaging Tokyo
Hoping to get the new 12" iBook within a week.

What are some of the first things I should do? I've never owned a mac, so apart from just enjoying it, are there any intitial setup things to do such as partition hard drives, etc, etc. I usually have a data partition on my windoze machines for backup, but what do you pros do.

Any setup advice appreciated.
 
VanMac said:
Hoping to get the new 12" iBook within a week.

What are some of the first things I should do? I've never owned a mac, so apart from just enjoying it, are there any intitial setup things to do such as partition hard drives, etc, etc. I usually have a data partition on my windoze machines for backup, but what do you pros do.

Any setup advice appreciated.
Click to expand...

Plug it in, let it charge overnight, have it play a DVD non-stop until battery is empty, plug it back in and let it recharge. There, your battery is ready.

Other than that, when I got my iBook 3 weeks ago, I didn't do much other than set up my internet (that is to say, follow along with the prompts that come up - easy as pie), load up my iBook with all my digital pictures (via an external firewire drive), and ummmm....oh play around with some widgets until I got them just right.

I'm no longer fond of partitions. After I got my iBook, I went back to my iMac (which was partitioned partly for backup reasons, partly for video editing, and partly to allow multiple user access to iPhoto) and wiped the drive clean and started over. I kept running out of space on individual partitions and having to move too much stuff back and forth between partitions, when my total drive space would've been enough.Especially with the smaller hard drives in an iBook, I wouldn't go that route.

Hope that helps.
 
Hakusai, I don't get your whole discharge recharge battery thing, i wouldnt do that!

Anyway, back to point VanMac.. take out machine, turn on.. it'll turn on anyway it should be charged enough.. then follow the extremely simple set up. Then you'll have a screen in front of you and everything will be super-fantastish.
 
5 hours of video battery life, you don't get to see the end of a dvd feature on a pentium m laptop now do you?
 
Mood said:
5 hours of video battery life, you don't get to see the end of a dvd feature on a pentium m laptop now do you?
Click to expand...

really? I thought it was 5 hours of battery life doing light work like word proccessing?
 
I kind of had the same feelings when I got my iMac. I didn't have Internet for a month either - what is there to do? This is general new-Mac stuff, not iBook stuff. No battery advice from me.

Get all your important data moved over. You can always get stuff you forget later, just don't throw away your PC (or old Mac). If you have an old Mac, set up firewire target disk mode to completely copy your old computer over.

Set up your accounts. People are generally advised not to use your admin account for web surfing, email checking, etc. I also set up a guest account, so if someone else wanted to use the compy, they could without screwing up my account.

Freeware! Let me think - at first, I downloaded disk image files (.dmg) on my PC and moved it upstairs with a flash drive.

Quicksilver has been very invaluable to me - it is said that no Mac is complete without it. Firefox is necessary - Safari is by no means perfect, and I love tabbed browsing. Netnewswire Lite is a nice free RSS newsreader, but I'm sure there are plenty out there.

AdiumX is a great chat client. It supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and many other chat servers. Its very customizable and extremely attractive. Growl (I don't have a link) is a great systemwide notification system. Gmailstatus is a cool menu bar tool to see how many emails are in your gmail account.

Get your peripherals hooked up - external mouse, scanner, camera, iPod, etc. If you find you need a USB hub, get that before you run out of ports. Burn all your CDs to iTunes (if you have Internet access). And you're set.

These are the kinds of things I did. Enjoy your new Mac!

Calih
 
or borrow your friend's wireless internet from next-door!

(and it's not illegal 'cause it's not in the constitution )
 
Hey All.

Thanks for the tips. I hope to be applying them soon.

(except maybe stealing next door neighbors wireless....I do have high speed already, and I live in the country, so neighbor is too far away) :)
 
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