MBP, what do I do first?

1st Mac, MBP, what do I do first?

OK, I found a used 15" MBP 2.33/2gb/120hd with iWork and CS3 for $1100. I figured with a memory upgrade to 4gb this would be a very good intro to Mac for me. Suggestions on any downloads I should get right away? Anything else I need to know right away? Anything I need to be watching out for?

I'd start with Firefox, coconutBattery (to monitor battery health), HandBrake (for ripping DVDs), The Unarchiver (for opening zips and stuffit files, etc), Transmission (for torrents), Flip4Mac (for opening wmv files), and Perian (for opening a bunch of other codecs with Quicktime).

If you want to get adventurous, I'd recommend trying Quicksilver. It's a hard application to explain, and it can do many things. I find using a Mac without Quicksilver on it to be a bit slow.

Also, I've got the same MacBook Pro that you're getting, and I should tell you that it does not support 4 GB of RAM. The max on that model is 3 GB.

Agreed on Firefox, it works better than Safari on some sites and has better options / tools. I prefer regular Bittorrent and limewire is SAFE to use on a mac (unlike on a pc). Switch is free and a must have for audio file conversion, as well as audacity for audio file editing, also free. Quicktime Pro is worth paying the extra few dollars for. Maybe one of the free .flv players. Go get the latest divx codec / player at the divx site. Neo Office is free and is ported just for macs, working better than open office. No need for MS office in my books.

For those of us still forced to use windows apps here and there, bootcamp works very well. The best PC I have ever used is my mac (in bootcamp only as needed...of course).

Thanks for the responses so far. I don't really do anything with music and don't know what torrents are or do so my question was more about things like disk defrag and updates and things like that. I do run a navigation package that has to be windows so bootcamp will be a must. Thanks again for the responses and please add to them as ideas occur.

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Fan Control - Increases fan speed for each increase in temperature, a must for the MBP which can get really hot. It sits in your system preferences whenever you need to change settings on it.

Perian - Lets you play almost everything in Quicktime, its a codec plugin that sits in your system preferences

Adium - The best IM application out there, tonnes of addons avalible for download on the homepage, my dock icon is the Adium icon with a black macbook you can get one with a MBP as well but theres heaps of others to choose from as well.

iStat Menus - Not really a must have but if you're like me and like to keep an eye out on your system then get this, it adds monitors into the menu, you choose what to monitor in the system preferences pane, i have up there right now, temperature, fan speed CPU usage and network.

Gimmesometune - An addon for itunes, it inly appears in the system menu bar when itunes is open, go into the preferences for it and you can tell it to automatically retrive album artwork, whenever you play a song it automatically downloads the album cover.

Main Menu - Sits in your menubar, you can configure it so that it automatically performs maintenance in two clicks using batch tasks as well as doing a alot of system related tasks like Force Emptying the Trash, rebuilding databases and so on.

Thats all I can really think of right now but will add some more later if I can think of any but those should get you started

That looks like a good site for someone as new as me. Thanks.