hi,
regarding padding: as a general rule, if you are not sure whether a numerical parameter will affect your simulation results, the best course of action is to just "try and see". Change parameter -> see if it affects the results significantly. For the padding, you should try to increase it and check that your simulation results are not affected by spurious "boundary effects".
as for tutorials: yes, in principle you should obtain the same results as shown in the manual. If you do not, please check carefully that you followed the steps faithfully (pay attention, for example, to the Normalization settings in the Analysis/postprocessing part, after extracting the field sensors - forgetting to tick this box would often lead to orders of magnitude difference in the results).