New to Macs and have some questions

Well I just got my new 13.3" MBP yesterday. I cracked open the box set it up. I don't have any problems, but I do have some questions and things I'd like to fix. I've only worked on PCs but I have heard lots of good things about macs, and I've played around with some of my friends. As a guy who has grown up on a Pc and knows his old PC like the back of his hand, a new OS can be pretty different. So here are some of my Questions:

Question 1: Useful Hot keys: On a PC Ctrl C to Copy. On a mac Command C to copy. But if there are some other cool ones like, how to close a window, minimize a window, and what not.

Question 2: What are some useful FREE programs that could help me and my mac out.

Question 3: How do I get rid of this on my desktop. I want to be able to run my messenger App, but I dont want to see this on my desktop.

Those are all my questions for now. If you can help me out thanks ALOT I will Thank (Not sure what its called on this forum).

Question 1: Command V is paste. Command Q quits a program.
Question 3: Oh that's a simple one! Here, I'll list the steps:
1. Double-click it.
2. You will see a window with two icons, one is the application's icon, the other is the Applications folder.
3. Drag the icon on the left to the one on the right. This will install the app.
4. Drag the "volume" that you want to get rid of into the trash can on the far right side of the dock. When you next empty the trash, it will be deleted.

Moved to correct forum - this is not a suggestion/question or comment about the forum itself.

1. Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts lists them all.

2. There are tons of free apps for the Mac, just depends on what you want to do. FreeMacWare is a blog that has a lot of apps.

3. Most apps that you download on the Mac will come in a file format called a "disk image", with the extension .dmg. When you open it, it appears as a virtual disk on your system. There are two basic ways to install software.

One way is the installer file, where you double click it inside the disk image, and it runs through a wizard that you would be familiar with from installing programs in Windows.

The second and more common way is the "drag and drop" method. Inside the disk image will be the icon for the app. Sometimes they will have a link to the Applications folder right in the disk image, so you drag the app a few inches to the right, and drop it in. If there is no link to the Applications folder, just drag the icon out of the disk image window, and hover over the HD icon on the desktop. After about a second, it pops open, then just drag down to the Applications folder in the sidebar of the Finder.

With either method, once you are done, to get rid of the disk image icon on your desktop drag it to the Trash. You will notice that the Trash can icon turns into the eject symbol. This "ejects" the virtual disk. There is no need to empty the Trash, as you haven't really thrown anything away. Also note that when you have an external drive or a USB thumb drive plugged in, you can drag the icon to the Trash to eject them before unplugging as well.

Thanks for the help. But I have a problem. I open up the virtual disk, drag the icon into the apps folder, then eject the disk. But when I open up Messenger, the virtual disk re-appears on my desktop?

Are you sure you dragged just the app icon into the Applications folder? Don't put anything but app icons into your apps folder. Sounds like you might be dragging the whole installer folder into it.

Look at my pic below. You are dragging Microsoft Messenger with the Blue and Green Avatars into your Applications folder? Then closing the window and throwing the image in the trash to unmount it? Then you are going to Applications and clicking on Microsoft Messenger that you dragged there?

You did something wrong somewhere.

Yeah, you must be clicking on the dmg file, you have to double click the icon that you dragged into the Applications folder. If its something that you will use very often, once you open it you can click and hold or control click the icon that is in the Dock while it is running to bring up the context menu and choose "Keep in Dock" so that the icon is always there.

Conversely, you can drag an icon that you don't use often off of the Dock and it "poofs" away. It's still in the Applications folder, but no longer taking up space on the Dock.

I have Messenger V.6 cause V.7 wouldnt let me change my DP. This is what I did.

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claudius753 said:

Yeah, you must be clicking on the dmg file, you have to double click the icon that you dragged into the Applications folder. If its something that you will use very often, once you open it you can click and hold or control click the icon that is in the Dock while it is running to bring up the context menu and choose "Keep in Dock" so that the icon is always there.

Click to expand...

Thanks. This helped me solve my problem. I forgot to change my icon. THANKS!

Glad you got it figured out, William.