Bought a used Macbook Air

I ended up buying a used Macbook Air and need some help. This is also my first Mac so be gentle.

It only came with the charger, no discs or stuff like that. It might have been a Best Buy display model since it's name is Best-Buys-Macbook-Air. I am thinking I would like to format it and rename the computer, what would be the best way to go about it? Should I buy Snow Leopard also? Any info would be great.

 

Does it have warranty?

 

I did not buy it from Best Buy, I bought it from someone so I assume no warranty.

 

Almost sounds a little warm.....

 

hot hot hot!

This is what you do:

1. Buy Snow Leopard ($30 plus tax from apple, or $25 flat - free shipping, no tax! - on amazon.com)

2.
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Secure another computer connected to your wireless network (windows or mac), insert the snow leopard disc into that computer, run the dvd over wifi utility, and use the wifi boot utility on the macbook air to boot from the snow leopard disc.

- OR -

secure an external usb dvd drive, plug it into the macbook pro and boot into the snow leopard disc
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3. use the disk utility to format your hard drive

4. install snow leopard on the clean hard drive

 

Yeah, if it came with no other accessories, and still has the Best Buy computer name, there's a pretty safe bet it was swiped right off the table. (Let me guess, you got an incredible deal on it?)

 

OMG he got a stolen macbook! / sarcasm
congrats. do what masterchef said!

 

Okay okay, I swiped it! I even got out with the power cord!

Seriously though it is all legit, had the serial numbers checked and all. I bought it with the power cord but no manuals or discs, which if they are anything like my wife then I understand. My wife will remove the item from the box and it goes right into the trash. She has thrown away the remote that came with our DVD player, the charger and usb cord for the camera, the list goes on.

So if I buy SL I can wipe it clean and start fresh? Seeing how I don't have anything on it I am not really losing anything.

 

No, you really don't want to do a clean install. For one thing if you have no disks you will lose the iLife suite. Also I'm not sure how Snow Leopard would react to the attempt to install it on a clean disk that does not have a copy of Leopard on it.

But if you do decide to go that route realize there is no "format" command in OS X; what you want to do is use Disk Utility to Repartition the drive, which essentially is the same thing under a different name. Make sure you specify GUID partition table.

But still I would rather create a new account, make it an Admin, and then delete all the other old "Best Buy" accounts on the computer. This will essentially give you a fresh install, and then you can upgrade to Snow Leopard at your leisure.

 

you'll also need to buy ilife 09 if that is something you want.

personally, i would prefer a clean macbook air without ilife versus "anything could be running on this computer including malicious software (virus) designed to get my personal financial information, but i can use ilife!"

of course, if you can invest $80 total for the operating system and ilife, you can get the best of both.

 

I think that way would be better also, just in case. I went and picked up a Mac drive to make things easier on me. I will go pick up SL later today and do the fresh install way. Thanks for the replies.

I was wanting to install World of Warcraft, can I just install it in OSX or do I need to do it another way?

 

WoW runs great on the Mac; I'm not sure what "other way" you'd install it, but downloading from Blizzard or feeding in disks from an external drive will work a treat, as will copying the whole WoW file folder over a network if it exists on another OS X machine there. With both expansions my WoW folder is about 15 GIGAbytes, however, so it's not trivial.

 

Thats good to know WoW will run on my Air. I guess I was referring to the other way as bootcamp. I just picked up the DVD drive but I want to install Snow Leopard before I install WoW. I really don't play much but it is a nice crutch to have installed.