A few tips
I have done a lot of Mac integration with Active Directory, extending the schema, binding and managing Macs with policies, etc, but given your situation with no admin support, there is little or no benefit to your integrating it with Active Directory and doing so may bring you more hassle and create issues, thus creating hostility for you and your Mac. Binding it to AD benefits the Administrators, not really you. If all you want to do is connect to a couple of shares, I would just do that and leave the AD stuff alone. Yes, you won't get Kerberos for Single Sign On (SSO) for some things, but the Mac OS X keychain gives you the same experience without the overhead.
There are some things you should do even if you don't connect to AD to make your life easier:
Name your Mac
System Preferences > Sharing
In the Computer Name field, change it so it conforms to your organization's naming standard, usually a dept name, AD username combination. Click the Edit button to change the local hostname too. You don't want your machine showing up on the network as "Andreas' Macbook". System Admins, network, and security folk appreciate that sort of thing. Don't use an underscore "_" or any special characters, but a hyphen "-" is perfect.
Fix name resolution
System Preferences > Network
Look in the Search Domains field to see if there are internal domain names here, such as example.com, apple.com, etc. They should be published by the network already, but if not add them. Separate multiples with a comma.
Connect to Shares
(If you don't know how) To get to the shares at your work, open Finder and choose Go > Connect to server (or
+K for shortcut) and type the SMB (stands for Server Message Block which is Windows sharing protocol) path to your share, e.g.:
smb://server1.example.com/share1. And click the + button to save the location for the next time. You will be prompted for your username and password for Active Directory, enable the option to save it in your keychain. If all is correct, you won't be prompted again until your password changes.
If you click the Browse button you may be able to find it, but then you can't save the address. It is best to find out the path to the share and use that. After you successfully connect to a share, drag a folder to your sidebar in the Finder for easy access in the future. If your destination share has a parent share (ask your admins), connect to the parent share, then drag your share/folder to the sidebar for easy access. With your credentials in the keychain, that will always provide immediate access to your resources. Note: Do not rename the Finder sidebar shortcut, it will rename your folder/share as well. No way to customize that I know of.
Email
If you have an Active Directory environment, you likely have an Exchange environment for email. If it is Exchange 2007 up to a certain patch level, you can use OS X Mail, Address Book and iCal to access your Exchange mailbox data instead of Entourage. Ask your admins if you use Exchange 2007, if you do, this should work. Simply open Mail and add an Exchange account to see if it works. All you need to know is your email address and your AD credentials (domain\username and password) to use it. If your environment is somewhat current this will work, if not, your admins are behind in administering their environment.
Printers
When adding printers, you will be able to see Active Directory printers published and others on your network, you
don't need to integrate with Active Directory for this to work.
Password Changes
One thing to know is that if you are replacing a Windows machine, you will not be able to change your password unless you have Exchange server for mail, then you can use the options in Outlook Web Access. Note you still have to know when your password will expire. You mention a PC on your desk, so if you still have that, you won't have any problems, just update the passwords on your keychain when prompted. There might be other workarounds for this.
