New to Mac

[Greyman646]

Finally had my fill of Windows 10 and all the stupid half baked updates that seem to make my system perform worse. I've had an iPhone for a year now and love it so I figured I'd give an iMac a try. They do have office for Mac but other than Mac not wanting to play with Access that is the only inconvenience I've experienced. I only have one database to keep track of all the Blu-Rays I've bought and there are other databases out there that do work on Mac. I did however make my first mistake on the Mac and it was with iTunes. I forgot that I needed to register the Mac to use my existing iTunes library. I thought that by simply signing into iTunes that gave me permission anyway. I was able to see the library on my NAS and set iTunes up to look at the NAS for file storage. I saw all my songs but they were greyed out. So I imported all my songs and that ended up creating duplicates and in some cases triplicates of all my songs. In the short term it fixed the issue of having access to the songs but it wasn't till I got an Apple TV box. I saw you could access iTunes from that but it informed me I must first enable home sharing. Went to the iMac to do so and found out that I couldn't because my Mac wasn't registered. So I registered the iMac and the Apple TV could see my library. A few days later I wanted to listen to a song on my iMac while I was doing some work and that's when I noticed I had two to three copies of each song in my library. I guess when I imported the library to get the songs on a non-registered machine it created the additional copies to form a new library for the iMac. Now I'm having the fun job of deleting all these copies. Guess that's the price ya pay for being ignorant.

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum and thanks for posting your "initiation" story.

I think we've all made a mistake when we were newbies. Generally for newbies to Mac it is more of the "I used a cleaner and now..." or "My antivirus software..." type mistake. There is no need for antivirus on the Mac, there are no viruses like those in Windows. And you don't really need any "cleaner" software either, generally. If you leave your iMac on 24/7 and just let it sleep when not in use it will do all the cleaning it needs during the daily activities at night. And about all may need for protection from malware is common sense and maybe the free version of Malwarebytes (Malwarebytes.com) to get rid of the occasional malware that shows up on some websites. A good ad blocker is good, too, although Safari now includes a kind of rudimentary one built in. Other than that, about the only product we recommend is OnyX (Sucuri WebSite Firewall - Not Configured) which can be useful if anything goes weird with your system. You don't need to run it very often, maybe once a year or so, unless you have systemic issues. Another similar and simpler product is YASU, which I have never used myself, but which is supposed to have a somewhat simpler interface.

In any event, welcome, come by often and ask questions.