noob frustrations

Hello everyone.
I have recently purchased a New iMac, and while its looks fantastic, my setting up of what i excepted to be a very simple process, hasn't gone well. I bought a display model system from high street retailer, and it had a clean install, running snow leopard, so I've spent £20 updating that to Lion, Ive also spent £10 updating iPhoto in trying to sync all my files to my iPhone. Ive created, I think an iCloud account, a me account, and have an iTunes account. Why i can't just use the one login for everything I'm not sure, though perhaps i can?
My iPhone won't sync to my iMac via cloud, or properly via iTunes. i have apps and some purchases synced, but no play list or any of my personal music collection that i have on my iPhone.
email is only setup because ive done it manually on both devices. calendar, notes ect arn't sync'd either. i watched a u tube video this morning of an iCloud setup, and at one point there user clicked a merge with account button on his iPhone. i havant seen this button in setting on either my phone and iMac.

On the whole very frustrated with my apple. i love the gear, but it seems now I'm a fully fledged apple owner the whole apple experience is like iTunes (the only part of the iPhone i hate), i closed prison environment.
searching for information is just as frsutating.

gone back to basic and joined a community you guys. thanks in advance for advice.
regards Trev

well, not much success their with my post, while these issues still persist, a couple of I hope more straight forward questions...

email and other window txt is very small. (like its very high resolution) can these be adjusted to make the windows more easily readable? my email txt is very close together, and when read on a PC almost merges with the next line. plus the txt is very blocky...an ideas would be appreciated. im writing this at 14 size font. but its more lke 8/9 size on my pc.
thanks all

Ok, let's break down the issues so they're easier to deal with.

Synching between iPhone and computer.
In System Preferences > iCloud what options are selected?
In iTunes, are you synching your music automatically, or handling it manually?

Font sizing:
What are the display settings on both the PC and the Mac?
What font are you using? (try using a more universal font like Times New Roman, if you're not and see if that helps)

Thanks Mike for the reply,
A few developments, my cloud seems to be working of a fashion, I've disabled email and photo backing up to the cloud which keeps me inside my 5 gb limit.
I think allot of the problems stem from settings for various things being accessible from to many different places, from within each App, from with the settings section, within I cloud , I tunes, mobile me ect..

My display solution has been to set the resolution down a couple of settings from the top increasing the over all window size. Fonts I use are standard times Roman, Arial, calibra..

I guess I just need time to get used to the way it all works

TrevTT said:

My display solution has been to set the resolution down a couple of settings from the top increasing the over all window size. Fonts I use are standard times Roman, Arial, calibra..

Click to expand...

This is the only real solution. At first, the screen looks a bit blurry, but it doesn't take very long for it to look normal.

When I occasionally set my display back up to full resolution, I am always amazed that there is anyone in the world capable of reading text at that default size. I would seriously have to be 3 inches from the screen to read anything, and my eyesight is not bad (glasses only for reading).

In fact, when I read forums (fora?) I also usually hit CMD+ to increase the font size a little more because it makes it just a bit easier.