New MacBook User

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MacBook 10.6.1 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Hi I am new to the world of apple and just got my first mac book. Is there anything I should download right away or know about?

Thanks!
 
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Macbook Pro, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD
U an msn fan?
You should get quicksilver its pretty awesome!!
 
OP
R
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MacBook 10.6.1 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM
No I dont use MSN much.

So far I have coconut battery and handbrake installed.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
13 inch alMacBook 2GHz C2D 4G DDR3, 1.25GHz G4 eMac
You need to get adium for all of your instant messaging needs. It connects to every imaginable instant messaging server, and is highly skinnable. Good call on handbrake. OpenOffice is a must.... Quicksilver rocks, but you won't even begin to use it to its fullest for a long time. I've been using it for 6 months and still have only scratched the surface. Such a handy little app though.

Growl is nice for alerting you when things happen (new IM received, download complete, new song begins playing, etc). I'll post more as i think of them,
 
OP
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Growl and Open Office is awesome! Especially Open Office. Thank you!
 
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27 iMac+Thunderbolt, iMac 21,
Yes - sort out our back up scene so if there is a HD problem in the future u do not lose all your important stuff. My MBP logic board failed at 18 months, so it does happen, but is not an issue if u are happy to be without a computer while it is repaired.
 
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21" iMac * 2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 * 16GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 * 1TB HD *AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB
Start backing up with Time Machine right away. Growl and Quicksilver are great. VLC to play unsupported movie files. Flip4Mac to play wmv's.
 
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2.16GHz C2D MacBook w/ 2GB RAM & 120GB HD. HTC Droid Incredible.
Hi I am new to the world of apple and just got my first mac book. Is there anything I should download right away or know about?

Thanks!

Please search the forums. There are plenty of threads with software recommendations.
 
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13 inch alMacBook 2GHz C2D 4G DDR3, 1.25GHz G4 eMac
Did you check out adium? It's pretty fantastic. In the system prefs there are tons of ways to customize the look of it, and it connects to like 20+ different chat services. It also has its own site dedicated to third party skins and such for it. :)
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook (MacBook5,1) Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2000 MHz 2 GB - DDR3 @ 1067 MHz NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
After nearly thirty years on a PC, I switched to a 13" silver MacBook several months ago.

I have become fairly well familiar with the Mac, I think, although I'm sure there are a lot of power uses that I remain unfamiliar with.

Overall, I like the Mac. Curiously enough, however, on the one thing that I most heard from Mac users who were urging me to switch to a Mac, my own experiences have been the opposite.

I had been led to believe that Macs don't crash, or that they don't crash nearly as often as PCs do, and that's not what I'm seeing.

I don't even demand a lot of it. Most of what I do is web-based so most of what I'm asking of my MacBook is to allow me to have a couple of browsers open at the same time, since I use an external monitor as well as the one on the MacBook.

That seems to be asking too much. Although I prefer the look and feel of Safari, I have all but quit using it because it crashes constantly, especially while trying to navigate from one page to another.

Rather than doing so, it too often gives me the whirligig as if moving from one web page to another is asking too much of the poor thing. Usually, it displays neither the page or a navigation error. I can navigate to the same page on my PC without trouble so it's not a network problem. In fact, I can often boot Opera or Camino up on the MacBook and it will navigate to the same page. At these times, Safari won't even let me navigate to another page instead, or even close the browser down, requiring that I force quit in order to get Safari to give it up.

Other times, often when there is no keyboard activity, Safari just quits, displaying the "Safari encountered a problem and had to close" error.

I am seeing problems more often with Safari than with other applications perhaps because more than 90% of what I do on the computer is web-based. But I have also had to force quit iPhoto and Mail several times, as well, and both have also closed out on their own with the "iPhoto encountered a problem and had to close". If I used other applications as much as I do a web brower, perhaps I would see as many problems with them as I do with Safari.

Perhaps six times, the entire computer locked up, forcing me to reboot it in order to regain control. In the years that I have used a PC, I have certainly had a lot of lockups but I think I've only had one PC that had these problems when it was as new as my MacBook is.

Curiously, the problems that I am having appear to be resigned to the applications that came with the MacBook, which is the opposite of what I might expect. I haven't seen it yet with Opera, Camino or Firefox; or with any of the other applications that I have installed.

So while I will still say that I like the Mac, I would never tell anyone what I was told repeatedly, before making the switch, that you won't have crashes with a Mac. If anything, my Mac crashes more often than most of the PCs that I have had over the years, more often even than the nine year-old PC that sits next to it.
 

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