Remember to save the discs that came with your computer someplace where you can find them again. I have a big plastic envelope for each computer. The manual that came with your Mac is worth reading too.

Before you plug the Ethernet cable from your network connection into the Mac and start it for the first time, there are a few things you may want to prepare.

• Your cable modem may be locked to your old computer.. if so you may have to power off the modem for a few minutes, or even call the cable company to have them reset it. If your home setup has a wireless router, you will want to know the network name, encryption method, and password.
• If you fetch mail from your Information Service Provider to your computer, you will want to know your mail provider's server addresses, and your account name and password. If your mail is on Gmail or Yahoo, you will want to know where it resides and the account name and password. (I recommend that you get a (free) gmail account anyway, as a backup to any other mail account.)

The first boot of your Mac will ask you to register it with Apple. You can skip this step, but it is useful to do in case you ever need service.

The first boot setup on a Mac will ask if you want to transfer files from another Mac. You can say no, and do it later using an Ethernet cable and the "Migration Assistant." This wored well for me the one time I tried it: I connected old and new machines to the same network, ran Migration Assistant on the new and old machines, and waited... a long time. It took about 30 hours to transfer 92 MB, including user files, applications, and settings. If your new machine is a replacement for an old machine, you will also have the option of restoring files from the Time Machine backup.

You can transfer files from a Windows computer using an Ethernet cable, if the Windows computer has networking installed. See  this Apple suport article. (If you want to import Outlook mail into Mail.app, you may need to buy a tool.. see the Apple articles for help.)

You should have an external drive ready so you can start Time Machine for backup.