[JM12345]

Hey fellas,
I didn't see a newbie section so I figured I would post in here. I just traded my Dell for a MacBookPro that should be arriving any day now . I am going to make the switch (my roommate has a G4 that I love). I have been looking through the posts and am really impressed with the strength of the community. Below are the specs of my laptop, but I do have a few questions:

- It has Bootcamp which I will play with. My question is could I run Office 2007 on Windows? The only reason I want to do that is until I get together enough money to buy the Office for Mac. Right now I use Outlook and OneNote everyday. Any recommendations?
Specs;
2.16 core duo
15.4" matte no dead pixels or scratches
100gb 7200 rpm hd
256mb x1600 ati video
1gb ram single stick
bluetooth 2.0
airport extreme
superdrive 4x
mac osx 10.4.8
bootcamp installed with win xp pro sp2
Ilife 06

- What should I do when I get the book, should I reformat the drive and start fresh?

- Since the deal is happening over a period of days (He is in Cali and I'm in NY so he's sending it to me first) could I go to an Apple store and have them check it out to make sure everything is running well and no problems?

- How does that laptop look overall for the specs? Is this a powerful machine?

Any other tips or recommendations would be great. I will be posting a great deal so I just wanted to get my name out. Thanks

[wubrew]

JM12345, welcome to the community of mac lovers. You are actually starting from the top by having a macbook pro. if you just follow any threads that might tickle your fancy, you will have no trouble picking up what you need to know. Just one suggetion: Max out on your ram becaue of the ram hungry Rosetta that Intel based macbook used to bridge b/t the ppc based apps and the universal based app which are coming out. Do not be intimidated to try out every feature OSX has to offer. Relax, explore and enjoy the superior MBP that you have acquired.

[peeb]

Welcome! You are going to love your new machine!
You can definitely run office 07 with bootcamp, but that is a dual boot solution. Right now the options are bootcamp (dual booting) parallels and office 07 (slower, but running under the apple desktop) or the native version of office (04 or something), or Neo office or something like that. Which one you need will depend on what you are doing - if you absolutely need to run the current version for some reason, parrallels or booting into windows might be the best - if you are an occasional user, something lighter weight might well work for you.

You could reformat, it would give you a clean install, but you'd probably be ok just creating a new user account and deleting the others. You probably don't want to have to reinstall boot camp. Your machine is going to kick ass - it's top of the line.