What's the best way to start using my Mac?
Just play with it. Experiment. Try things. Even try the Help menu.
Don’t I risk breaking something?
It’s pretty hard to break a Mac or OS X just by using it. But there are a few precautions. If you have important/interesting/valuable stuff on your computer, you need to have copies of that stuff in one or two other places. [We’ll talk about backup later], but some methods are to burn data on DVDs, back up to external hard drives, use Apple’s MobileMe backup service, or even email copies of important work to a friend or to another email account. When working on stuff you care about, every once in a while save a copy of the file with a new name (a, b, c...). If one file has problems, you’ll be able to go back to the previous one. The other precaution is to not move or rename files that you didn’t create. Mac OS X needs a lot of special files in special places, and it put them there already. Leave them be.
With those two precautions — don’t move files you didn’t create, and keep good backups — you are pretty free to try things on your Mac without risk of hurting anything.
Published March 24, 2009 12:00 PM
Last modified on June 17, 2009 2:44 PM
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