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

Has this ever happened to you?

You are making a document on your computer and now it is time to save it. You know where you want the file to be placed, and in fact, you have that folder open. But when you go to the Save command, the application you are using takes you to the last folder that you used. For example, this:
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Eventually, in the life of every Mac user, that "something" disappears. In the case of Terry, a recent potential Bob LeVitus Consulting customer, it was the loss of the Quick Look Button in the toolbar of each window.

Now, while we are in the business of making money by fixing people's computers, answering question and giving tutoring sessions, there are many questions that are so easy to answer that we simply cannot charge for them.

Bob answered this one, using a great new program, Skitch, to take a screen shot and annotate it. These were his instructions:
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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!
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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.
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I recently helped a newcomer to the world of word processing. Her techniques were definitely rooted in the days of the typewriter and applying the rules for document layout that she had learned so many years ago definitely made editing her documents difficult!

The first problem was centering a title. In typewriter days students were taught to position the carriage in the center of the platen and then to spell out their title in their head, pressing the space bar once for every two letters in the title. Gosh, that sounds like a bunch of techno-babble. I am not even going to try to explain it. Instead, lets take a look at the modern universal sign for line placement. This screen shot is from TextEdit.
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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...

After I installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I spent some time learning my way around the new operating system and assessing its features. One thing that really did not impress me is Quick Look. My daily working computer is a 17" MacBook Pro.

I make use of every inch of my screen real estate. I keep several application windows open and position them carefully so that I have instant access to the tools I need. While some users enlarge every window to fill their screen, I keep windows large enough to be useful, but small enough that I can move between applications by simply clicking in their window. 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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As a long-time Macintosh user, I have used AppleWorks for years. For those who are not familiar with it, in addition to word processing, Appleworks also contains several other modules including both draw and paint.

Now that Apple has issued an End-of-Life for AppleWorks, it is time to learn how to do some of those special projects in the iWork suite.

My project for today is to make a decorative heading for MacMousecalls. 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...

I had an interesting call recently. The client complained that whenever she tried to fill out a form on the Internet, Safari seemed to have all the wrong information.

So, where does Safari get its information? It uses your entry in the Address Book: 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...

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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It happens to all of us -- and all to frequently to those of us who live in thunderstorm country where surges, spikes and brownouts cause electrical disrutptions.

You were on the Internet yesterday (maybe even earlier today) and now you can't get online. So what in the heck is going on?

Our first reaction is to call our ISP (Internet Service Provider). And their first reaction is to make changes to your computer settings. DON'T!

I have a favorite motto: If you were on the Internet yesterday, you will probably be able to get there tomorrow, but today may be a problem. But if you start messing around with settings, you probably will not be on today or tomorrow!
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Printing problems are the source of many calls we receive from clients. Somehow, their printer has stopped working.

This first thing I ask is "Is the printer turned on?" This is sometimes the problem for clients who have ink jet printers. All ink jet printers should be turned off when they are not in use to prevent the ink from drying out and clogging the printer heads. However, in our days of wireless computing, this means you need to go to the printer to turn it on and off each time you print. If you dislike having to turn your printer on and off, consider a laser printer. These are now very reasonably priced.

If the printer is on, and you still cannot print, the printer may have been "stopped" in the printer utility. Each time you press the command to print, a file is sent to the printer. You can check the status of your printer after choosing Command-P by looking in your dock. You will see an icon that probably looks like your printer. As the file is sent, you will see a picture of a sheet of paper: Read More...