Hello All, New iMac user Here ...

Hello All,
I decided to replace my six year old PC running Windows 7 and since I don't like how the Windows OS is heading in its new versions, I decided to join "The Dark Side" and get an iMac.

So, I'm the proud owner of a two day old 27 inch, Retina 5K, late 2014, iMac (with every Apple hardware up-grade offered).

It's been a busy couple of days so far, with many more to come (I'm sure) ...

I joined this forum, because, as I'm totally new to the Mac, I'm sure that I'll have many questions to ask ...

Things that I've done so far ...

Updated to Yosemite 10.10.3 and every other update offered in the Apple Store.
Configured Time Machine to use the external 3TB HD I bought for that purpose and as an external data disk (1TB for data, 2TB for TM).
Started to load my CD collection into iTunes; I decided to do a clean install, rather than just import the files from the PC ...


Over the following weeks, I'll have many, many questions ...


Stutz out ...

Congratulations on your new computer and welcome to the forum.

Hi Stutz and Welcome!

You will find a wealth of information on this forum and a lot of nice people to help you. Looks like you are off to a good start. Very nice iMac you have there. Setting up Time Machine is an excellent idea,

I recommend you consider installing two free extensions to your browser - Adblock Plus and Ghostery. Be sure to set them up to fit your preferences This will help a lot with drive by browser issues.

Lisa

Welcome to the forum and to the "dark side" as you called it.

Couple of things, there is a great threadhere for new converts. Written 5 years ago, still valid.

About the only "add on" you might look into is Onyx:

Titanium Software - Home

Get the version for Yosemite. Run it every six months or so, leaving all the defaults. It will clean up caches for you and in general keep the pipes clear on OS X.

Other products you may find of use are:

AdwareMedic, Adblock+ and Ghostery - to stop annoying popup ads in browsers and to prevent them from coming back.

ParagonNTFS - if you need to write to a Windows formatted drive for any reason.

Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! - both make clones of your boot drive, handy for when the HD dies and you can't get to your TM backups. TM isn't bootable, although it does store the entire system. CCC and SD! clones are bootable. CCC creates the Recovery Partition as well, which I think SD! doesn't do. But both are great products.

AVOID: CleanMyMac and anything like that. You only need Onyx for all your maintenance needs.

AVOID: Softonic, CNET downloads and just about any download site that aggregates software in one place. They tend to bundle in crapware and adware that is really annoying and sometimes hard to exterminate. One good site is macupdate.com. But I get most of my software from the App Store at Apple or from the developer site directly.

Antivirus is a touchy subject. There are presently no known viruses for OS X in the wild, so a lot of us run without any AV software at all. The next step up is ClamXav, which scans for viruses in OS X and works reasonably well. It doesn't install and reside permanently in operations like others. About all these products find are Windows viruses in files or emails you get from your Windows friends. On the other side of the coin, running naked means that you do have to be ready to leap into action the instant a real OS X virus is detected and reported. Again, it's a personal decision. I run naked, others here have various products installed and used. I do have a copy of ClamXav, just in case I need it, but I've never actually had a reason to run it other than morbid curiosity.

Actually... You came from the Darkside! Welcome and enjoy. There are super people here. ;-)

Some of us prefer/recommend having a dedicated external HDD for Time Machine, rather than it being partitioned and shared with other data.
JP

And some of us avoid Time Machine and use cloning software, but the suggestion of the external drive is tops. The problem with any backup on a partition is what happens when, and not if, the drive fails? They all do, platter, SSD and Flash Storage.

I have two externals for backups, one dedicated to TM and one for Carbon Copy Cloner. Both are 1TB drives as they are backing up a 500GB SSD boot drive. I have other drives for external data storage.