I took over the development of my employer's website about 6 months ago, and in the past few months we've begun optimizing the site to compete in our regional market of sunrooms, patio enclosures, and other home improvement services.  In the process, we began to speak with SEO firms about what our site needed to compete in the serps.  One issue they never failed to point out is our site's duplicate index in Google due to the www and sans-www index.  I didn't understand what the problem is with this, and I still don't.

Question 1: Does it matter if you have two indexes?

Not really understanding the issue but trusting the advice was sound, I set up a 301 redirect and used Google's webmaster tools to set my preferred domain. I opted to set up the redirect and the preferred domain to paradiserooms.com, and I dropped the www.  The domain is about 2500 days old, and we do have a spattering of incoming links (most of them are pointed to www.paradiserooms.com).

Question 2: Was it a mistake to drop the www?

I'm completely new to SEO, so I apologize if this issue has been cover countless times already.