It is always fun when Bob LeVitus comes to Washington DC. This year he will be doing two days of seminars for my user group, Washington Apple Pi.

These seminars will be much like attending his seminars at Macworld Expo, except the price is MUCH cheaper!

If you would like to learn more about this event, be sure to check out the information page. To sign up, click here. I have linked to a copy of the pdf that we are sending out. To view or download a pdf file of the seminar information, click here -->levitus_seminars

Running a consulting business with my friend, Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus, can lead to a few strange nights! Since I live in the eastern time zone, our friends in the Pacific time zone are just getting to their personal computers about the time that I am getting ready for bed! Of course, since our Skype telephone number has a 408 area code, it can really confuse everyone!

The truth is that I may head up the stairs around 10 in the evening, but that does not mean that I put away my computer till a few hours later. I just love the convenience of a MacBook Pro, a good wireless network and Skype! I do some of my best reading and writing curled up in my bed. Of course, my husband is totally tied to paper, but who needs to hold paper to read and write these days!

Last night my computer began ringing (via Skype) at about 11:30. I had been playing telephone tag with a client all day, and we finally got a chance to connect. Our client had recently moved from a Power Mac G4 as his "main" computer to a Power Mac G5. He began the process by doing an "Archive and Install" to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on the G5. There had been a few problems, but he thought he had corrected them. Then he used the Migration Assistant to move his files to the G5. One thing led to another and it was time to call for help!

The point of this blog post is to help you determine when it is all right to simply install a new operating system right over the old one, when an "Archive and Install" is a better plan, and when it is time to do the "dirty deed," or as Macintosh consultants often call it, a "nuke and pave." (In Apple, Inc. terms, when it is time erase the hard drive and install a new operating system.)

Back in October, when Leopard was released, Bob and I tried all three of the different methods, and our results were surprising!

My computer was fairly new and I don't run a lot of third party software that "enhances" the Mac experience, so I repaired permissions with Disk Utility while still in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Then I started my computer up off the the new Leopard DVD, ran the First Aid part of Disk Utility to make sure there were no hidden directory problems and then installed Leopard right on top of my old version of Tiger.

Now, for any of you who are Mac geeks, I can just see you shaking your heads and thinking that Pat is such a fool, but I did it this way since I knew that many Mac users would do exactly the same thing. (I do hope they repaired permissions and ran First Aid!) It worked out just fine! I had NO problems and went right to work learning about this new big cat, Leopard. So, yes, in the right circumstances, you can perform what is commonly called a "dirty install."

Bob did basically the same preparation with Disk Utility, and then he used the "Archive and Install" installation procedure. He was not so lucky! Although he thought that all of those third-party start-up items were up-to-date and okay, they caused him nothing but trouble! Probably, the moral of that story is that disabling start-up items is not a bad idea when your are going to do an archive and install. Then introduce them slowly so that you can make sure there are no conflicts with the new operating system.

My husband's computer, a PowerBook G4, was the third candidate for the upgrade. It was turning 4 years old, and it had been my computer until I had upgraded about a year and a half ago to my MacBook Pro. It has been quite some time since I had done any real maintenance work on it, the hard drive was pretty full, and there had been lots of software upgrades since it had last had the drive reformatted. It was also having a few problems that I was not sure were really gone.

Even though it would require much more work, that computer deserved – no, NEEDED a fresh start! I knew Ron would appreciate all the cruft being removed so that its 80 GB hard drive was as empty as possible and all the programs would be registered to him, and it would finally really be HIS computer instead of a hand-me-down with my name lurking in odd places. I installed all the applications from the CDs or disk images and I made sure to apply all the updates. Then I brought only his photos, music, documents, calendar, address book, and email back onto the computer.

It's now been a few months. I am not sure how Bob's computer has fared, but around here, Ron's computer is the most organized and has the fewest little issues cropping up. I know he appreciates having just the things he uses installed instead of all the programs that I have on my computer. And because everything was fresh and up-to-date, his small hard drive seems larger and he spends less time asking me to fix problems.

As for my computer, it could stand a good housecleaning! There a programs that I am no longer actively using. I really should archive some of my older documents and email, and I need to pare down my music and photo libraries. When did Steve say that Mac OS X 10.6 would be out?

As for the title of this blog post, do you remember the chorus from Kenny Rogers's song, The Gambler?

You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when youre sittin at the table.
Therell be time enough for countin when the dealins done.

Those words come to me sometimes when am trying to decide the best course of action in upgrading a computer!

Pat

Tomorrow morning I will be half of the presenting team that will do a presentation comparing Microsoft Office 2008 and iWork '08. I will be needing to share a lot of links with my friends from Washington Apple Pi, a Macintosh User Group that serves Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia.

In looking for ways to present a lot of material in a very short time, I finally decided to let some others do the work for me!

First, let's take a look at the two applications and what they provide.

No none can speak better for office than the Microsoft Mac Business Unit. Head on over to view a comparison of the three versions of Office 2008:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/shop-now.mspx

While there are three different price points for Office 2008, most users will not need to get more than the Home and Student edition. At $150.00, it includes licenses for three computers. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage.

Compare that to iWork '08. It costs $80 for one computer, but only $100 for a family pack license for up to five computers.

So just who are the other versions for?

If you work in an office that uses Microsoft Exchange, you will need the $400 version. I have not checked the license, but I am pretty sure that while you can install it on up to 2 computers, only one can be running Office at a time. In addition to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage, it includes Microsoft Server Exchange Support and Automator Actions for Workflows in Microsoft Office.

As for the $500 version, they throw in a new product, Expression Media that apparently organizes you media files -- um -- sort of like iTunes and iPhoto.

iWork '08 includes Pages (like Word), Numbers (like Excel) and Keynote (like PowerPoint). The functions included in Entourage are provided by Mail, Address Book and iCal.

The Case Against Entourage

While there is no support for Exchange Server in iWork '08, there are clear advantages to using Mail, Address Book and iCal. Each of these applications store their information in a separate data file, and in fact, each calendar in iCal is also a separate file. It gets even better, each message in Mail is a separate document.

Possible data corruption is always an issue with computers and the larger and more complex a file is, the greater the risk of its being corrupted. Entourage stores all of your email, addresses and calendars in one huge file. If it becomes corrupted there is NOTHING that can recover that file. The data is so intermingled that it cannot be parsed out into individual data strings.

The files produced by Mail, Address Book and iCal can be easily opened by TextEdit. Although they are not pretty, it is not too difficult to recover the data strings.

What others have to say concerning Office 2008 vs iWork '08

These are quite interesting. Be sure to read the comments at the bottom of the article as they have been written by a wide variety of users:

Office 2008: Goodbye iWork?
January 22, 2007 by Yasser Dahab

Office 2008 vs. iWork vs. NeoOffice vs. OpenOffice
Posted by Christopher Dawson

Will Office 2008 popularize iWork, like Vista popularized
YourDon Report

The obligatory Office 2008 vs. iWork thread
MacNN Forums

AppleInsider and Prince McLean provide the most complete and detailed comparisons of Microsoft Office 2008 and iWork '08. They are a must-read to get a total look at the various applications.

From AppleInsider, by Prince McLean:
Road to Mac Office 2008: An Introduction
Road to Mac Office 2008: Installation and Interface
Road to Mac Office 2008: Word '08 vs Pages 3.0
Road to Mac Office 2008: Excel '08 vs Numbers 1.0
Road to Mac Office 2008: PowerPoint '08 vs Keynote 4.0
Road to Mac Office 2008: Entourage '08 vs Mail 3.0 and iCal 3.0

iWork '08 and its features

In preparing for my presentation, I spent a lot of time learning all that I could about iWork. Although I use the programs frequently (almost daily), I know there is so much to learn.

For an in-depth study, my favorite web site is Lynda.com. For only $25 per month, or as little as $250 per year, you can visit the web site and watch in-depth tutorials on a huge variety of subjects -- but most courses include 7 to 8 hours of video, so it is a real time commitment. Links to the iWork titles can be found here:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modListing.asp?pid=281

Each course includes about 6 free movies to give you a chance to see if this kind of training will work for you.

Apple has a number of tours and training videos for the iWork '08 Suite. Although they are rather fast-paced, you can learn a lot from them.
http://www.apple.com/iwork/
http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/

Yet another resource are the videos available from the video podcast, ScreenCastsOnline by Don McAllister. Don's offerings are not as in-depth as the Lynda.com videos, but there is enough depth to learn a lot about the application that he is covering in an episode. Since most of the tutorials are only 30 to 45 minutes in length, it is easy to be introduced to new material fairly quickly. Because he utilizes videos of the screen, it is easy to follow along and try out the techniques he presents.

I heartily recommend a subscription to ScreenCastsOnline as a way to easy and affordable way to learn new programs for your Macintosh.

While there is a new free show each week, he also offers memberships that include extra member-only shows and content. The first 6 months of membership costs $49.00. After that, the fee goes to $24.00 each 6 months. When you join, you get full access to the back catalog of shows also.

Don has done shows on Pages, Numbers and Keynote in recent months and has older shows available for Pages and Keynote.

While there are many other resources available for learning about iWork '08, these are the ones I consider to be the most valuable.

-- Pat

The day I installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was a bittersweet one for me. I had come to rely on a little tool, Mail.appetizer, to make sure that I immediately saw any messages coming into my Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus Consulting email mailbox. Unfortunately, the old version broke in Leopard.

Because Mail.appetizer was a beta application and it had not been updated since July 2005, I held out little hope of seeing a new version coming soon.

This morning I received a message from Stefan Schüßler of Bronson Beta, the developer of Mail.appetizer. He has just released a new version that works with Leopard Mail! It is still a beta, but it seems to be very stable.

So what, exactly, is Mail.appetizer and what does it do?

Mail.appetizer is a plugin for Apple's Mail program. It is installed in Mail preferences and it is accessed through the Notification item.

I get lots of email ever day and while much of it is important, I need to see any messages that come into my Dr. Mac mailbox IMMEDIATELY!

Since I need to see just those, I click the Mailboxes: Custom button and configure it like this:

Now each time I receive an email, a translucent gray box appears on top of whatever is open on my desktop and I can scan the message to decide if I need to deal with it immediately.

I can control the length of time that it is displayed, how transparent it is, the font and size in which it is displayed and even more in the Notification setup panel in Mail Preferences.

If you need to keep on top of your email, I heartily recommend Mail.appetizer. Stefan Schüßler of Bronson Beta, the developer has released Mail.appetizer as donationware. If you like his product, please consider sending him a few dollars to encourage him to continue developing Mail.appetizer.

While I know that many of my readers are experienced in downloading and installing software such as Mail.appetizer, I know that some of you have never tried downloading and installing new software. Questions such as this can be handled in a troubleshooting session. Downloading, installing and configuring most applications takes less than 15 minutes. The charge would be $30.00 at Bob LeVitus Consulting.

If you would like to learn more about how to install software and what to do when faced with the many different ways new software is presented, then consider booking a tutorial session. The cost of a one-hour tutorial is only $60.00. We will use our special software that allows me to see your screen and even control your mouse and keyboard so that I can help you learn whatever you need to do on your Macintosh.

For all of those sons and daughters who need someone to give Dad or Mom a hand, consider the gift of a tutoring session or two for Mother's Day or Father's Day. Send us a message at UrgentRequest@boblevitus.com and we will help you arrange your gift.

-- Pat

There is nothing that causes more debate in a roomful of Macintosh geeks that the topic of hard drive defragmentation!

The most interesting part is that you can almost divide the room into the anti-defragging group vs. the "you must defrag" group based on the color of their hair!

Now just wait a minute--before you begin thinking age discrimination, you need to know that not all of us gray-haired people people are in the defrag camp, it is just that there are way too many of us there.

Let's go back to the earlier days of Macintosh computers. Back in the day when we had not even heard of Mac OS X. Defragmenting your hard drive was a necessary evil if you managed to fill you drive close to capacity. However, back in those days, a 40 MB hard drive was not un-heard of. Of course, our files tended to be much smaller, but we were not surfing a web filled with graphics. We were not downloading hour-long podcasts, we were not using digital cameras that routinely take 10 MB images.

If you used Mac OS 7 to 9 and you used your computer frequently, you needed to defragment your hard drive once or twice a year. Mac users got so used to defragmenting their drives that some even made it a part of weekly or monthly maintenance routine.

Many of the older Mac users are still in search of the old days. They would feel most comfortable if there was a set of things to do every week or month.

The engineers over at Apple know that every utility that helps you "fix" your computer is soon out of date, and running old utilities on newer versions of the operating system is a recipe for a mess!

Our newer Mac users have never had to perform periodic maintenance tasks on their computers, so they are much more content to let hidden maintenance routines take care of keeping things running.

I recently was lead to this article by Amit Singh, one of those REAL Mac geeks. Although it was written in the days of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, the article certainly applies to today.

It is long and deep, but the conclusion is the part that I want you to read:

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/

In case you did not make it to the link, these are the two most important paragraphs:

Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile, in most cases, because the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation.

It is risky to defragment anyway: What if there's a power glitch? What if the system crashes? What if the defragmenting tool has a bug? What if you inadvertently reboot? In some cases, you could make the situation worse by defragmenting.

So what do you do when your Mac is running slow?

1. Restart - something as simple as a restart can often speed your computer up. Remember there is not a contest to see who can go the longest between re-starts!
2. Make sure you have enough RAM. Apple recently began shipping all but its most inexpensive computers with 2 GB of RAM. If you don't have at least that much, it is probably time to think about installing more RAM and you can install it yourself!
3. Quit programs that you are not using. I am always amazed at how many programs the typical user has open on their computer. While Mac OS X reduces the amount of memory being used by applications that are running in the background, they are still using some RAM and if your computer is low on RAM, quitting programs you are not using can help to speed it up.
4. Restart your Internet browser every few hours. It does not matter if you are using Safari, Firefox, Opera, or even Mozilla, all browsers use more and more RAM the longer they run!

If you computer is still running slowly, it may be time for a checkup from the crew at Bob LeVitus Consulting. Although this will count as a troubleshooting call, we can still usually diagnose and fix slow computer problems about 30 minutes, so the cost of the service is usually only $60.00. If the problem is RAM, we'll even tell you about several places to order RAM and get you ready to install it yourself using nothing more than a screwdriver (except for the Mac Mini). Remember, these are Macs, so even adding RAM is easy!
--Pat

We get questions – lots and lots of questions over at Bob LeVitus Consulting. While many people really need help (and that's why we exist), there are some questions for which the answer is so simple, that I put up an entry here on my MacMousecalls blog.

In the case of SUID warnings, just what they are and how to fix them would require a LOOOONNNNGGGG explanation, but Apple Inc. provides an easy answer in its Technical Information Library article #306935 – just ignore them!
Read More...

Do you remember back to the days of Mac OS 9 – and probably 8.5 – when we could have a printer icon sitting on our desktop?

Now, that was a pretty cool trick. If you had a document to print, you could just drag its icon over the desktop printer. The document would print without opening the application and choosing the Print command in the File Menu.

The feature is back in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and it is even more useful! It is a great way to deal with documents that you print on a regular basis. For example, directions to your home or office, a favorite recipe, or perhaps some sort of form like a cover sheet for your fax.

Unfortunately, if you are trying to adopt that clean desktop look for your Mac, it is one more thing to clutter it up. There are several alternate things you can do to give you the functionality of desktop printing while keeping the clutter down and we will discuss those after we have made a desktop printer to try out.
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Have you ever wanted to find a particular file on the Internet? You might be looking for a specific music file, pdf, or photo. Normal Google searches show you web pages. This tip will allow you to search for directories with specific files.

The type of search we are going to perform is one using the "intitle:" query. And for our example, we are going to search for the song "Happy Birthday."

Our search query will look like this:

intitle:"index.of" (mp3|aac|mp4)happy.birthday -html -htm -php

Of course, each space or lack of space is VERY important, so let's take it apart.
Read More...