Tips and Advice
BACK UP! You need copies of your data because the hard drive inside your Mac will eventually die. 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. I can 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 $119 for a great quality drive you can rely on, plus about an hour and a half of my time (depending on speed of machine and data quantity). 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.
Penny wise and pound foolish. Ben Franklin was one smart dude, common sense to spare. As it applies to trying to keep old Apple Computers going it can sometimes be very hard for people to think about buying new equipment and letting go of what seems to be a perfectly functional computer. But folks, do yourself a favor, give the 6+ yr old machine to a nephew, niece, son or daughter for use as a word processor and buy yourself a new computer, everything will be so much easier and faster you'll be glad you made the decision and you won't be spending good money on slow obsolete gear.
If you need an All-in-One printer I currently recommend Epson Workforce. For pure black and white needs get a laser printer (cheaper to run), Lexmark or Brother makes a good one for a reasonable price. What you choose depends on your volume needs of course. While wireless is all the rage , you'll have less set up hassles and better reliability if you stick to models with a USB Cable option.
Please memorize or write down securely your Macs' 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 (that is, no characters at all for the password), see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506, since you will be unable to use sudo functions in Terminal.
One of the least expensive and best ways to increase the performance of your machine is to add Ram. I can order ram upgrades from my long time vendor who provides a lifetime warranty yet has great prices. Apple's ram prices are approximately double. Be aware that many newer Macs are not upgradeable, so buy more than you think you'd need at the outset. 8 gigs is the minimum I'd settle for currently.
I suggest you not set up your machine 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 stop you cold.
Do NOT install Adobe Flash Player plugin! Subsequent updates are the source of many Adware and Malware installations. Use Google Chrome if you need to see a Flash Video (it has it's own built in Flash Reader) or go to YouTube and search for the same content.
Along the same lines be careful you don't get tricked into installing Web Browser extensions. They exist for all the main web browsers: Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari. If you notice that your home page has changed or your search engine looks odd, you've probably been hijacked. Installing the AdBlock Plus extension can help you avoid getting tricked.
