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Back Up, Back Up, Back Up! You need extra copies of your data because the hard drive inside your Mac will eventually wear out. It is a fact of life. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've been approached by distraught individuals who knew better, but just never got around to making those critical backups. Human nature is such that perhaps over 95% of people are not going to manually do consistent periodic copying of data. Let's face it, it's time consuming, tedious, and easy to put off. The trouble starts when your hard drive stops working. You may get a warning with a tell tale click click click or you may not. Here's what you can do: hire me to set you up with an external hard drive on which I will clone the entire contents of your internal drive and setup a daily automatic backup. It'll cost you about $150 for a great quality drive you can rely on and about an hour and a half of my time. And best of all you'll be able to start up from this drive in an emergency, and clone back onto a replacement drive when necessary.
If you are looking for an All-inOne printer I suggest Canon or Epson, Epson if you are going to be concentrating on photos. For pure black and white needs get a laser printer. It's much cheaper per page of output. While wireless is all the rage , you'll have less set up hassles and better reliability if you stick to a USB Cable or Ethernet.
Please memorize or write down somewhere secure your Login password aka your Administrative Password. This is used for giving permission to install software or make changes to your System. Administrator accounts should not have a blank password, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506. Also keep track of your Apple System Discs, they are needed to reinstall software, or reset your password.
One of the least expensive and best ways to increase the performance of your machine is to add Ram. I can order ram upgrades. I have a long time vendor who provides a lifetime warranty yet has great prices. Apple's ram prices are higher and there's no lifetime warranty.
I suggest you not set up your machine to automatically login. Instead create at least a secondary administrative user as a clean emergency user that you can enter in the event your primary user space should ever get corrupted. Done this way, at each start up you'll be presented with a login window at which you'll enter your password each time before it will proceed to the desktop. It has the added benefit of keeping your machine more secure from potentially prying eyes. I find it is also better not to have programs automatically launch at startup, if your machine develops a system problem and won't start up fully, having programs trying to launch at the same time can make resolution more difficult.
I still like to repair disk permissions both before and after any software installations. This is done with Disk Utility which lives in the Utilities folder, which in turn is located inside the Applications folder. It can also be done from your first System DVD Installer that came with your machine if necessary.
Learn how to properly install software in OS X, what is a disk image, what do I drag where? Typically one downloads an installer with a .dmg at the end of the name. This file is doubleclicked, creating a Disk Image, this in turn needs to be opened. Inside you will either find the actual Application which you can drag to the Applications folder OR another installer icon you have to doubleclick and follow the prompts. You will typically be asked to enter your Administrative Password at some point.
You can drag an Application from inside the Applications folder onto the dock to create an alias or shortcut on the dock, but be careful not to drag the Application out of the Applications folder, some Applications will not function properly out of their home folder and when updaters are run and the Application cannot be found, the update will likely fail.
Can you navigate between Icon view, List View and column view? I can show you how to take advantage of each mode. But do yourself this favor first, Apple in their infinite wisdom ships the operating system with what I think is a goofy default setting, so when in "Finder" (you do know what I mean here right?), go under the menu item called Finder and select preferences, in the window that opens, check off the box next to "Always open folders in a new window". Now you can compare multiple folder windows side by side and move files back and forth much more easily!
