SCO0131 - Setting Up Your Mac - Part 1

04 January 2008 Filed in: Setting Up Your Mac | For Switchers | OSX | Applications
The Apple Store (U.S.) - Welcome to the Apple Store-1


For the first show of the new year, I thought I'd offer a helping hand to all those new Mac owners fortunate enough to get a new Mac for Christmas. The theme of this show was suggested by a viewer and I enlisted the help of the guys and gals over at the ScreenCastsOnline forum to assemble a list of best practices and essential software for the new Mac user.

The resultant list is just too much for a single show so I'll make it into an occasional mini series of shows for the new Mac user.

This first show looks at several different aspects of setting up a brand new mac from the view point of a new Mac user. I look at:
  • Basic Dock Customisation
  • Converting to a Standard Account
  • Using Parental Controls
  • Switching on the FireWall
  • Setting a Screensaver Password
  • Pointers to Using Time Machine
In addition to these common tasks, I also recommend six free software packages to get you up and running as quickly as possible (including running through the different installation routines for all of them) The software includes:
  • Firefox - Web Browser (although I do recommend at least trying Safari for a short while)
  • TextWrangler - A Fully Featured Text Editor
  • Paintbrush - A simple bitmap graphics tool based on MS Paint
  • Perian - Some essential video codecs to allow you play many different types of video
  • Flip4Mac - Windows Media Playback
  • The Unarchiver - Free unarchive utility for many formats
These are just the start and we'll look at many more useful utilities and applications in the following episodes.

Discussions: Forum

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