- Joined
- May 5, 2013
- Messages
- 88
- Reaction score
- 2
- Points
- 8
- Location
- Los Angeles, CA
CookieMonsterXO, welcome to the Mac world! I too am a recent first-time Mac owner (May 1), and I love my MacBook Pro!
I've installed two OS updates with no problems at all (my Mac shipped with 10.8.2, installed 10.8.3 then .4 when it became available).
One nice thing about Macs is that when a new OS is released, it's quite a bit cheaper than Windows. OSx 10.9 (Maverics) will cost $19.99; in contrast, Windows usually costs at least $99 (OEM version), and quite a bit more for other versions.
Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac installed for me with no problems at all. I use my Mac mostly at home, but I have occasionally used it at work, too, mostly with Excel, for breaking down movie and television show scripts (I work at a movie prop house, so we sometimes get scripts from our clients so we'll know which props and set dressing items they'll need from us), and we use Excel to make our prop lists. I have found that files created in the Mac version are 100% compatible with the Windows version, and can easily be transferred back and forth between Mac and PC.
Two apps I recommend are "Battery Health" and "Memory Clean." Battery Health gives you a lot of good info about your battery, and Memory Clean allows you to clean your RAM, since closed programs tend to leave bits of themselves in RAM even after they're closed - you can free up RAM with this app.
The one thing I'm hot very happy about is that there aren't many games available for Mac outside the Mac App Store. I did find one game that is made for Mac, though, and it runs well on my MBP 15" Retina - Diablo III. There are also some Mac games available through Steam.
Lastly, if you do need to run Windows on your Mac, you can use Boot Camp to install Windows on its own partition, and it works flawlessly! I have a few older games that run on PC only, as well as MIDI control software and synthesizer programming software which only runs on Windows. I first tried one of the free VM (virtual machine) offerings from the App Store, but I ended up having to restore my entire hard drive from a Time Machine backup, so I just recommend Boot Camp now for installing Windows. You can use one of the more reputable VM softwares for running Windows from within OSx, but system resources are shared by both OSes - in contrast, Windows running on its own partition means that all system resources are available.
One more thing.....buy an external hard drive and do regular Time Machine backups, especially for the first couple of months you own your Mac - had I not backed up prior to messing around with VM software, I would've wasted many hours restoring my HD by having to reinstall everything. The Time Machine restore took just minutes, and worked flawlessly. The external HD size should at least equal the size of your internal HD - I have a 250GB SSD in my MBP, so I bought a Seagate 500GB Slim portable drive (USB 3.0), which was only $69.
I've installed two OS updates with no problems at all (my Mac shipped with 10.8.2, installed 10.8.3 then .4 when it became available).
One nice thing about Macs is that when a new OS is released, it's quite a bit cheaper than Windows. OSx 10.9 (Maverics) will cost $19.99; in contrast, Windows usually costs at least $99 (OEM version), and quite a bit more for other versions.
Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac installed for me with no problems at all. I use my Mac mostly at home, but I have occasionally used it at work, too, mostly with Excel, for breaking down movie and television show scripts (I work at a movie prop house, so we sometimes get scripts from our clients so we'll know which props and set dressing items they'll need from us), and we use Excel to make our prop lists. I have found that files created in the Mac version are 100% compatible with the Windows version, and can easily be transferred back and forth between Mac and PC.
Two apps I recommend are "Battery Health" and "Memory Clean." Battery Health gives you a lot of good info about your battery, and Memory Clean allows you to clean your RAM, since closed programs tend to leave bits of themselves in RAM even after they're closed - you can free up RAM with this app.
The one thing I'm hot very happy about is that there aren't many games available for Mac outside the Mac App Store. I did find one game that is made for Mac, though, and it runs well on my MBP 15" Retina - Diablo III. There are also some Mac games available through Steam.
Lastly, if you do need to run Windows on your Mac, you can use Boot Camp to install Windows on its own partition, and it works flawlessly! I have a few older games that run on PC only, as well as MIDI control software and synthesizer programming software which only runs on Windows. I first tried one of the free VM (virtual machine) offerings from the App Store, but I ended up having to restore my entire hard drive from a Time Machine backup, so I just recommend Boot Camp now for installing Windows. You can use one of the more reputable VM softwares for running Windows from within OSx, but system resources are shared by both OSes - in contrast, Windows running on its own partition means that all system resources are available.
One more thing.....buy an external hard drive and do regular Time Machine backups, especially for the first couple of months you own your Mac - had I not backed up prior to messing around with VM software, I would've wasted many hours restoring my HD by having to reinstall everything. The Time Machine restore took just minutes, and worked flawlessly. The external HD size should at least equal the size of your internal HD - I have a 250GB SSD in my MBP, so I bought a Seagate 500GB Slim portable drive (USB 3.0), which was only $69.
Actually (since Mac's went to the Intel cpu)...things have certainly gotten better!
