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

Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline stays very busy producing his weekly screencast. Last week's episode was a tutorial on VectorDesigner, a piece of software included in the January MacHeist bundle. I bought the bundle, downloaded the software and filed away my new serial numbers, then got busy with all of my current projects.

I own Adobe Illustrator. I can't say I use it much, but I occasionally work with a client who needs help and I can usually figure out what is wrong or I can point them to a good resource for help. The learning curve for Illustrator is so steep, that I just never use it for my own projects.

However, I certainly need a tool to help me produce vector graphics easily – and oh, yes, I need a quick tutorial to get me going. Don's latest screencast has caused me to take a fresh look at VectorDesigner. His tutorial is easy to follow and in less than 30 minutes, I now feel ready to tackle a project or two.

Be sure to check out the ScreenCastsOnline shownote if you want to buy a copy of VectorDesigner as Don has secured a $10 discount for his listeners.

There is a new MacHeist bundle. Check out the details at the web site and be sure to look for more tutorials at ScreenCastsOnline!.

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

Back in elementary school, we learned to write dates by putting the month, then the day, then the year. That date form works just fine for things like letters, and although it was a little inconvenient, it works just fine for hand-sorting things like checks. But it is terrible for sorting things by date on a computer.

While many things can best be sorted by a title, many items that we store on our computer work best by date. For example, each time I buy something on the Internet, pay a bill, or receive a password, I make a pdf of the document and store them is a folder that I call Passwords and Receipts.
Read More...

I am so old that back when I was in high school learning to type, a computer took up a whole room. To type a school paper you used a typewriter, a device that many of today's children may never have seen).

Much of a typing class was spent learning how to lay out a document. Students learned the rules for spacing, paragraph format and page layout. Times have changed with the use of computers and word processing software, but many of the old-time rules are still used. Unfortunately those rules help to produce documents that are impossible to correctly format in a modern word processor. I will take a look at some of those old rules over the next few blog entries and show you the current way to handle text in a wide variety of applications.

We will begin with spacing after punctuation marks such as periods, colons and semicolons.

Back in the days of typewriters, most had a "well" of bars that contained the letters. Click here for a picture. Each of these bars were the same width and so all letters produced by the typewriter were the same width. The font produced by using the typewriter is called a monospace font today. Here is a example of what type would have look like along with the same line in a proportional font Read More...

One of the really nice features of Mac OS X is the system-wide dictionary that is available in all applications that are written in Cocoa, Apple Inc.'s programming environment for programming.

For you, the end user it means that when you make a spelling error, the same database is used to check the spelling of a word. This means when you add a word to your user dictionary in an application such as Mail, that same user dictionary is used to check the spelling of the same word in TextEdit, Pages, Keynote and a wide variety of third party applications.

For example, each time I type my last name, Fauquet, it is underlined with red dots as shown in the illustration below. Read More...

Don't you just hate it – you get an email with a link – maybe lots of links. You decide to visit them, but some of them just don't work.

There are several things that can cause a link to break: Read More...

Remember the good old days? Computer screens were no bigger than 640 x 480 pixels, we generally had only one window open, our eyes were better!

NOT!

I couldn't do without my 17'" MacBook Pro with a screen resolution of 1680 x 1050. I love having that 20 HDTV that connects to my computer and functions as a second monitor. I don't know how I could work if I could only use one program at a time, but I hate not being able to find that little tiny arrow that is my cursor. It gets lost among the windows and among photos of the grandchildren that are my frequent finder backgrounds.

I give lots of presentations from my computer and being able to locate my cursor needs to be easy and effortless. My favorite cursor locator is a freeware application, Mouse Locator from 2Point5Fish.com. Whenever Mouse Locator pops up during a presentation I am sure to get several questions regarding exactly what that neat "thing" is that appeared on my screen. Read More...

Font lists that are too long case frequent call from Macintosh users who like to keep things simple. While designers and graphic artists love having lots of fonts to choose from, many Mac users are dismayed at the length of their font list.

Over the years we have received many calls from clients who decided to take the matter into their own hand and suddenly their computer or their favorite application will no longer work. This is not a good situation. It requires doing an archive and install of the operating system to correct the problem. If an application such is Microsoft word begins acting strangely, you will need to re-install it.

So just which fonts are needed?
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We are back to the email that we received at Bob LeVitus Consulting over the weekend. John asked how to change the label on an icon. In the previous entry, I explained all about changing icon names. But, perhaps, that was not the real question.

Back in the days of Mac OS 9, there was a feature that allowed the user to add a color label to icons of folders, documents, and even applications. While they make your screen more colorful, they can also be very useful in making items stand out. While this feature was missing in the earliest versions of Mac OS X, it was eventually re-introduced. Read More...

Over the weekend we received an interesting inquiry at Bob LeVitus Consulting. John (not his real name) asked how to change the label on the icon for a flash drive.

The question is an interesting one. It is not totally clear to me exactly what is being asked. While icons can have labels, I suspect John was asking how to change the name of the drive. Just in case, I will also talk about icon labels at the end of this entry.

If you want to change the name of a drive or a folder or even a file, there are several ways to do this. The most obvious is to click and hold on the name with your mouse. Of course there are several "states" that the icon name could be in.
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As a Macintosh user, it is not uncommon for me to have dozens of windows open on my computer. I usually have several Finder windows open so that I can copy files between different folders and hard drives. I probably have two or three different Safari windows, at least a couple in Mail, my Address Book, iCal, and at least a couple of windows open for any application that I am using.

Trying to get to the desktop can be a daunting task. With the advent of Mac OS 10.3, Apple Inc. introduced Expose´. Suddenly pressing one key (F11) cleared away all the window and let me get to the files on my desktop!
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We have had several calls in the past week in which the client cannot boot their computer after a crash. When they use their System CD to restart their computer and run Disk Utility, they are met with the message that their disk catalog is corrupted and it cannot be repaired. So what is going on? How can a drive that was working suddenly just stop working?

When they call and we begin unraveling their problem, some will tell us that they were downloading a huge file from the Internet. Others will recount that they had been seeing a message that indicated that their startup drive was almost full, but they did not know what to do, so they ignored it or they were waiting to call us in the morning. What should they have done? When is a hard drive too full?
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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.
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Are you a gamer?

I am NOT -- except, sometimes. We bought our first Atari game system around 1979. That was definitely not my thing, though my husband and children loved it! It has been followed over the years by many other game systems, few of which ever caught my attention. Somehow, I am not into first person shooters and the other styles of games that are on most gaming consoles don't do much for me.

However, on my computer, I do have a folder of games. They tend to be be puzzle, word and card games. Over the years, I have learned the importance of games in working with computer users, particularly older users. We must train our eyes to see details such as links and buttons on web pages, icons and words in application menus and small details in general on the computer screen. Read More...