And if you don’t have a Mac, my above suggestion tells you why you should have one. That’s all you need to know to fix 90% of the problems you MIGHT encounter with a Mac. Of course, you should repair your permissions once a month, just to be smart. All the cool snobs do.
We have had the beach ball of death come up three ties in the 4 month that we have owned our Mac and each time we have had to literally UNPLUG the sucker to get it to run again. Once we had to call Mac Tech Services because the whole thing crashed and would start up.
On a PC if you have a problem, which is rare unless you have a faulty piece of third party software, you just hit Control/Alt/Delete and everything gets fixed.
Uh, blu? The Mac defrags itself... on the fly.