The battery should be new in a refurb, but you should nonetheless make sure you calibrate it. It's usually best to do this once a month as suggested, though for my MacBook Pro - which is on the mains more often than not - I don't bother more than once a quarter.

You can check your battery condition in System Profiler (click the little Apple logo at the far left of the menu bar, then choose About This Mac and then More Info - also go here to ensure your system is up to date with Software Update). A very useful widget (small applications that live in your Dashboard) is iStat, which will help monitor your battery easily. It's free (one can make a donation).

There's a collection of guides on the Apple site, that may be of use.

If your dock icons for applications don't seem to respond to your click, try going to System Preferences, Dock and select Animate Opening Applications. The dock icons will now bounce while they're opening. Note that in Sys Pref and many other OSX apps, there is no need to click "Apply" or "OK" as the change takes effect immediately you select it.

Spaces is a delight. You can assign applications to open in their own space - so you might have Safari in Space 1, Scrivener in 2, Excel in 3 and so on. You swap between them with Apple key + arrow keys. Much easier to flip between research sources. Add this to Exposé (which reduces all open windows on a desktop space to fit the screen, where you can select the one you want to go to) and working with multiple sources open becomes really easy. Of course, this may not be your modus operandi.

With Scrivener, don't overlook the full screen writing mode. Everything goes away but your words. It's very productive, and your research is only a click away.