Hooking Up Your Mac


I know you're excited to turn on your new computer. I remember when I bought my first new car and just wanted to go out and cruise the highways and try out the engine and handling.

However, you can't just turn on your computer and browse the Internet. You have to hook up a few things first. So let's go through the steps:

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  1. Place your Mac on a desk.

  2. Follow the suggestions in the previous section, entitled "Unpacking Your New Mac," to position your computer correctly.

  3. Plug in the power cord, and take the other end and plug it into a convenient AC jack. Don't turn it on yet! You need to do a few more things before it will work properly!

  4. How do you plug things into your Mac? Let's take a look at the flat-panel iMac as an example (see Figure 1.1).

    • graphics/newterm_icon.gif A Universal Serial Bus , or USB for short, is a piece of technology that enables you to connect up to 127 different accessories to your Mac. In addition to the keyboard and mouse, you can add extra drives , printers, scanners , digital cameras , joysticks, and more. (We'll discuss USB in greater detail in Chapter 7, "Choosing Peripheral Devices.")

    • graphics/newterm_icon.gif FireWire is a high-speed peripheral standard that enables you to connect DV camcorders, fast hard drives, and other products to recent Macintosh computers. (We'll discuss FireWire again in Chapter 7.)

    • graphics/newterm_icon.gif A network is not as complicated as it sounds. Whenever you hook two computers together, or just attach a printer to your Mac, you are on a networkjust as in your office, when you try to make new friends or business contacts.

    • graphics/newterm_icon.gif Ethernet is a popular networking technique that offers high performance and easy setup.

    Figure 1.1. Plug it in before you try to turn it on.

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    The placement of ports and jacks varies from model to mode, but the jacks and ports are more or less the same.

  5. Take the keyboard's cable and connect to one of the Universal Serial Bus jacks (it really makes no difference). Don't force the plug, it only connects in one direction (the side with the special symbol on it is at the top).

  6. Plug the mouse into either jack on the keyboard. It really doesn't matter if you use your mouse left-handed or right-handed.

    graphics/bookpencil_icon.gif

    A mouse is the pointing device you use to point to items on your Mac's display and to click them (which is the act of selecting them). Although a mouse or similar device is used on all personal computers, the Mac is unique because only one button is needed. In contrast, computers supporting other computer operating systems, such as Windows, require at least two buttons .


  7. If you want to use your computer's built-in modem to connect to a network, connect a modular phone plug into the modem jack (the one labeled with the phone receiver icon). Put the other end in your phone jack, or connect to the second jack (if any) on a telephone.

  8. To connect your Mac to a regular Ethernet network, a cable modem or just to a single printer with an Ethernet connection, plug in the network cable to the jack on your Mac.

    graphics/bookpencil_icon.gif

    Although the modem and Ethernet jacks look almost the same, they serve different purposes. The smaller jack, for your modem, is used to dial up the Internet or send faxes. The thicker jack, for Ethernet, is used to connect your computer to a network printer, to another computer to share files, or to access a high-performance Internet connection (we computer geeks call it "broadband").


  9. If you have a Mac with a FireWire port, you can hook up a FireWire hard drive, DV camcorder, or other high performance device to either of the two FireWire ports. I'll tell you more about FireWire in Chapter 7.

  10. Turn on your Mac. Where's the power switch? That, too, varies from model to model, but it is typically a round button.



Sams Teach Yourself Mac OS X Digital Media. All In One
Sams Teach Yourself Mac OS X Digital Media All In One
ISBN: 0672325322
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 349

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