Just ordered my first ever Mac, any advice?

hoogie

hoogie

hoogie

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Just ordered my first ever Mac, any advice? *Updated with HDD format query

Hi All,

I have just ordered a refurbished 13" MacBook Pro i5 system, should arrive next week so thought I would start getting some advice in the meantime.

I am a total Mac newbie so are there any top tips you guy can provide? Few specific areas I am interested in:

1) Any must have software I should get?
2) Any must have system tweaks?
3) Is software like CCleaner and disk defragging required on Mac or does system do it automatically?
4) When upgrading to Lion should I do clean install or just update?
5) Anything else?

Thanks guys!
 
Last edited:
hoogie said:
Hi All,

I have just ordered a refurbished 13" MacBook Pro i5 system, should arrive next week so thought I would start getting some advice in the meantime.

I am a total Mac newbie so are there any top tips you guy can provide? Few specific areas I am interested in:

1) Any must have software I should get?
2) Any must have system tweaks?
3) Is software like CCleaner and disk defragginf required on Mac or does system do i automatically?
4) When upgrading to Lion should I do clean install or just update?
5) Anything else?

Thanks guys!
Click to expand...

1) Any must have software I should get?
Yes

2) Any must have system tweaks?
No

3) Is software like CCleaner and disk defragginf required on Mac or does system do i automatically?
Automatically

4) When upgrading to Lion should I do clean install or just update?
Clean

5) Anything else?
No
 
Thanks for the concise response :)

Amazed that there is no need for system maintenance (CCleaner, defragging etc) on Mac systems! Nice change from Windows.

I have another query actually relating to file formats. What file formats do Macs support? Currently I have an external HDD formatted in NTFS which I know will not be supported by the Mac. Is my best bet to format this as a FAT drive or are there any specific Mac formats I should use?

Thanks again for any advice.
 
Last edited:
hoogie said:
Thanks for the concise response :)

Amazed that there is no need for system maintenance (CCleaner, defragging etc) on Mac systems! Nice change from Windows.

I have another query actually relating to file formats. What file formats do Macs support? Currently I have an external HDD formatted in NTFS which I know will not be supported by the Mac. Is my best bet to format this as a FAT drive or are there any specific Mac formats I should use?

Thanks again for any advice.
Click to expand...

Don't be amazed. Welcome to the Mac World.

I use an application which I purchased called Paragon NTFS writer. This reads and writes to NTFS disks. It's better this way as you have a universal disk that can be read and wrote to by both Windows and OSX.
 
exFAT is also a good format that is fully supported natively by both Windows and Mac OS X. The downside? It's not supported on Linux (yet).
 
That's a good deal OP :)

My external is also NTFs but there are plenty of little program's that will just run in the background and allow you to read/write to NTFs with no problems, I think I use the one mentioned already.

Enjoy the mac :D

The best thing to do is just have a play around with it, are you sure it doesn't come with lion already instaLled?
 
I'm not 100% what OS it comes with to be honest, I guess as it's a refurb there is a chance they will have updated it to Lion...

Thanks for the responses regarding file formats. Interesting to see that there's software to make the Mac compatible with NTFS. Are there any drawbacks to simply formatting my external HDD as FAT 32?

It would be great if the Mac supported NTFS but not sure I want to buy any software in order to do that, also if it requires an extra software layer does it have an impact on performance?

Cheers
 
hoogie said:
I'm not 100% what OS it comes with to be honest, I guess as it's a refurb there is a chance they will have updated it to Lion...

Thanks for the responses regarding file formats. Interesting to see that there's software to make the Mac compatible with NTFS. Are there any drawbacks to simply formatting my external HDD as FAT 32?

It would be great if the Mac supported NTFS but not sure I want to buy any software in order to do that, also if it requires an extra software layer does it have an impact on performance?

Cheers
Click to expand...
Issue is with FAT32, you can't write single files larger than 4GB iirc?
 
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