Difficulty creating a new user.

Question

I have been given a Macbook at work and have been instructed to add a new user and delete the old user profile.
I have never used a mac before (nor has anyone else in my IT department) so I turned to the internet for help. It seems that this should be an easy, if not trivial task, and I found many tutorials. However, all the tutorials I could find started with "Go to the Apple menu and select 'System Preferences...'. Sadly, this does nothing. Well, no - not completely nothing. The highlight flashes once and the drop-down menu disappears and it seems that the click has been successful, it is just that no window opens after that.
Is there a way to add and remove users without first going to Apple>system preferences?
The previous user returned only the Macbook, charger, and box. No documentation or cd's and no longer works for the company so I have very little to work with. The serial number thingy tells me it is no longer under service contract.

Answer 1

What exactly should I be searching for? My google-fu has failed me and I cannot seem to find the file name of the System Preferences program. I tried searching for "System Preferences" just in case I was operating under the wrong paradigm and shouldn't be looking for a file name at all, but all it came up with was something called 'Accounts.prefPane'. There does not seem to be any option for adding or removing accounts on this pane that I can see.
Oh, and the Applications folder you directed me to is utterly empty. I suspect it was emptied by the previous user before it was returned.
I must admit, I experienced something of a sinking feeling when you drew my attention to the pane at the bottom. It has a smiley face that identifies itself as 'Finder', some sort of Spedometer thing that identifes itself as 'Dashboard' and then a whoooooole row of question marks. The fact that all these question marks idenify themselves as things like 'Safari', 'Ichat', and 'Icalc' only added to the "Uh oh" feeling .