Daughter Bought A Mac


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Laptop with Leopard installed. Due to be delivered this week. Ummmm, what I can remember:

Intel dual processor 2something???

1 G Ram

80 gigawatt hard drive (will be plenty big enough for her)

And......even though she's used Macs at College and I bought her a Leopard for Dummies book, *I* haven't read it, I graduated College, so I have questions :)

First of all, Hitest, thank you for the questions about the airport thing as I had no idea what it was when she ordered her laptop--*I* thought it was something that enabled one to use the laptop on an airplane! And isteve, thank YOU for explaining that any router can work with a Mac. Phew!!! You just saved Daughter a bunch of $$ as they have a Linkskys router at their apartment.

Is 1 G enough ram? I know it is plenty for WindowsXP, not enough for Vista....There was an option for 2 G ram/$150 more and I can maybe call and change it if necessary, but:

Is it possible to add ram to a laptop at a later time? (thinking Crucial will be cheaper! Does Crucial sell MacRam??) Aron and I added ram to a desktop, but these little bitty idiotboxes, dont know if it's even possible.......

Is is really true we need no AV? Looked at BB and Staples and found nothing, searched online and said AV isn't necessary. Daughter is a bloomin' idiot when it comes to surfing......

And the same for Antispyware? I love Spywareblaster as it prevents cooties from ever entering the idiotbox.

She has a Dell Printer, which is really a Lexmark with a Dell sticker on it, I *think*. I dug myself a hole and researched and it looks like Leopard doesn't always play nice with printers yet? Will her existing printer work? Ummmm, how does one get drivers? (yeah, I know, I know, I never had to do that!!)

Ummmm, here you thought you were done with the dumb questions---what is the internet explorer called on a Mac? Just curious.

Can you tell I'm more of a n00b than Hitest? :D

Thanks in advance, you can bet there will be more questions to come!

Liz

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Is 1 G enough ram?

yes it is enough for most things.. I have 1 gig in mine, but Mac OS is different in that ram is more important than CPU speed. so the more you put in the better.

as for where to get ram, any where that sells ram. the Mac does not take a different type of ram then other laptops, but they do check for speed and type. this is one reason they have better customer service numbers, they pick ram that is stable and not necessarily the fastest. I have bought from Crucial for a Mac

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp...%29%20MB062LL/B

Anti virus..

this is the part that is hard for windows users to swallow.. but viruses really only exist on windows..

for the long answer, there are viruses for every OS made. but for Mac OSX, Linux and UNIX as a whole there are fewer than 40 active viruses and out of that most are lab only, meaning you can not get them as they are for research groups.

but if you are really worried http://www.clamxav.com/ does the best job and It's free, who says it does the best job? see here http://www.informationweek.com/software/messaging/166402818

as clamxav is using the clamav core.

as for the printer, plug it in and hit print..

also its not OSX not playing well with your printer, its manufactures of printers comming up with there own way to talk to printers and not using the standards. most of this has to do with non printing funtions of a printer, like card reader or scanner. My HP is listed as not compatable, but prints just fine, its the scanner that does not work.

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First of all, Hitest, thank you for the questions about the airport thing as I had no idea what it was when she ordered her laptop--*I* thought it was something that enabled one to use the laptop on an airplane!

You're very welcome, Liz. Your daughter will love her unit. :matrix:

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You put my mind at ease, Iccaro, and thanks!

As far as the ram, she doesn't do anything "computerheavy", like "videoediting or such", but has been known to have a half dozen windows open at a time when chatting on aim and surfing--so I guess we'll just see how she does with the ram. Her current PC has only 256gigawhats so 1G should seem speedy to her!

And yay with Crucial! I know there are cheaper places to buy Ram, but Crucial does such a good service matching the correct Ram with one's computer, I'd rather spend a couple extra bucks to throw them the business. My lil' way of saying "thanks".

Great to know with the printer, too....crossing the fingers as she'll just have to try it and see. Luckily, her two roomies each have working printers so if worse comes to worst, she can always email her printwork to them and have them print for her (had a moment of reason in the past half hour! ;)). As for the scanner, that's hooked up to her brother's idiotbox....as far as I know she's never even used it!

I guess the real dilemma is expecting *something* to be difficult!

Liz

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Is she getting it from Apple online store. Macworld starts tuesday and there may be some updates and if there are her mac will come with them.

Crucial RAM is great very good company. I buy my RAM from OWC they specialize in Apple and if you update your RAM they will usually buy your old RAM. And 1 gig is fine I'm using my 4 year old powerbook 133Ghz PPC processor with 768 Mb with leopard and is very snappy.

And be carefull of the Mac fanboy thing, it starts with being confused, then actually enjoying using the mac next your shopping for a black turtleneck B)

Almost forgot every mac user has to visit Joy of Tech once a week.

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She bought it online from Apple...that'll be great if its all updated!

Good to know she has enough Ram (again, not being familiar with the OS had me scratching my head) and really good to know about OWC--I've been successful in giving old Ram to good homes so it stays out of the landfill but another way to get rid of it is always appreciated!!!

Liz

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  • 2 weeks later...

On the mac, the equivalent of I.E. is Safari. There are plenty of other browsers available for the mac, but for many people safari can get the job done.( this does not go for safari 3 which is still in beta, it tends to crash allot ) If you feel safari is wimpy I recommend using camino. It is not as pretty, but in my opinion, it is better then firefox for the mac( it is actually only for the mac and mozilla, A.K.A the maker of firefox, created this browser which is completely cocoa)

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Welcome to Besttechie's, Option!

And yup, last weekend she announced she finally found Safari (thanks to her Leopard for Dummies book!)

Her Geekyfriend was supposed to play with *ahem*, I mean "set up" :) her new laptop as he's a Mac guy and he mentioned changing Safari to something else--I'll suggest Camino if he hasn't already installed it. Thank you!

Haven't gotten any frantic phonecalls or emails so I'm assuming she's figuring things out....well, at least I'm assuming she hasn't broken the thing yet....*knockwood*

Liz

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