Any Help For The New Guy?!!

Hi there everyone, hope you are all ok.

Just wondering if i could get some help and hint nd tips for the new MacBook I got yesterday.

So far I have eventually managed to download and install MSN Messenger and a few other programs also have transfered my music to iTunes and also my photos over.

The main things im puzzled about how to set up iMail and iChat, also is there a way I can install anything so I can get my Hotmail instead of having to log into msn all the time?

I look forward to hearing back from you all with your hints and tips, and there are all fully appreciated.

Yours

Mark

get rid of messenger for mac. download adium.

you may also find this useful coming from windows: renamer4mac since finder natively doesn't like to rename more than one file at a time.

and of course a program like onyx or mainmenu for simple system maintenence (cache and log cleaning and more!).

Whats so good about Adium if you dont mind me asking? (believe me there will be a lot of questions asked here!!)

Also what exactly does Onyx do?

There's also Name Mangler, which isn't as feature-rich as renamer4mac, but it's donationware.

Adium is the established standard in Instant Messaging for OS X. It is lightweight, fast, insanely customizable, and supports most any IM service you can think of.

Onyx will perform maintenance on your machine as well as allow you to change certain hidden settings.

renamer4mac doesn't require a fee either, they take donations.



adium is a multi-client chat tool (think: trillian, miranda, or pidgin) that just looks/works better on a mac than messenger does. and since messenger on a mac is just a really stripped down windows version, there's barely any incentive to use it over something like adium.


onyx does a number of things from system tweeks to scheduled maintenence. mainly, it's a nice simple interface to do a lot of stuff you could do via command line - if you knew what you were doing. check here for more info

Ok, right ive put Adium on and yes it does seem faster in a weird kind of way.

I forgot to mention the spec for the MacBook. Here we go. Intel Duo Core 2.4ghz with 2gb ram, running version 10.5.6 of OSX.

I think ill leave Onyx off till I get a little more used to things on here first. Have downloaded VLC media player as I love watching my wrestling streams and had that on my old laptop.

One thing I am slightly miffed at is the fact I cant seem to find iLife or iWorks on the machine despite being told that they were on it.

ilife isn't really an app, more a collection of apps like imovie, garageband, iphoto, etc. so if you have those, you have ilife.

did you buy iworks?

eric said:

renamer4mac doesn't require a fee either, they take donations.

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Forgive me, after a quick look at the link you provided I saw "shareware" and didn't bother to look any further.

EDIT: After further research it seems that it IS in fact shareware. The developer's website notes the price at $26.

How do you figure there isn't a fee?

np - you should try it now that you know it's 'free' ;P

No I didnt, but you would have thought that for just under £750 i'd get the bloody thing lol.

Any tips on the setting up of Mail? as in how the **** do I do it? lol

that should be pretty easy, you just need to know your username/password and incoming and outgoing mail servers (which your ISP or mail provider should be able to provide).

office and the mac equivalent are usually not included with the OS, but could be part of a premium package of sorts.

Don't ditch msn messenger just like that. There are times that Adium keeps crashing or having issues and its usefull to know i have an alternative that'll work when needed. Of course adium is much better and my default IM.

iLife is a suite of software that includes, among others, iPhoto iDVD DVD Player and so on. It should come pre-installed on every new mac.

iWork is Apple's repsonse to Office, it includes Pages (Word), Numbers (Excell) and Keynote (a much better PowerPoint). You need to buy it (or MS Office) if you want it. You also have some free alternatives like Open Office whom which im not familiar so i cant really add anything more.

With mail, i've never tried setting a hotmail account but use gmail.

If you have a free hotmail account, you won't be able to set it up with Mail. MS crippled it about a year ago because they want everyone to pay for hotmail. Most of us that were using Hotmail have moved to gmail or other.