Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer! So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.
The new OSX Lion comes as an upgrade from the Apple App Store – not on a DVD. The good news is that once you’ve paid for it once, Apple allow you to install it on all the computers you own for free! After you purchase it from the App Store you just have to go into the App Store on your other computers and Lion will be there – all paid for and ready to download again!
The Apple page on this is here.
Of course, you need to upgrade all your existing computers to Snow-Leopard first.
The main hitch is that it needs to download lots of files first. See Paul’s comment below on how to avoid this.
There are two main ways to backup your Apple computer.
1. Use Time Machine to automatically backup. This is the Apple way – the easy way.
OR
2. Manually backup your computer with some other software such as Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Apple’s way (Time Machine) is a lot simpler. The big disadvantage is that the backup is not bootable. If your computer crashes you need to insert the original DVD and restore from at the Time Machine backup. This can take hours.
The second method takes a few steps longer to set up, but your backup will be bootable. That means if you plug your backup drive in hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup you can boot straight off your backup drive. In an emergency you can plug in your backup and be running from it under a minute. You can’t do this with Time Machine.
This article describes how to manually backing up using Super Duper. Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper are both paid apps. Super Duper has a free version which will do the job.
Did you know that if you hold down SHIFT-COMMAND-4 you can take a picture of any part of your screen? Press SHIFT-COMMAND-4 and your cursor will turn into a cross-hair. (Try it right now!) Click and drag over anything and you can take a picture. It’s how most of the small pictures on this website are made.
Continue reading »
Switching to OS X from a PC is a big change. Here are a some of my random thoughts on the transition. Continue reading »
So your old laptop is running a bit slowly… it might be that the hard drive is too small and all your hard disk space is all used up. Here’s a few different ways to recover some extra Hard Drive space. Basically there are lots of files you can probably get rid of, and here’s now to find them.
You don’t even need to be totally free of space to do this, did you know that you should never fill your hard drive to more than approx 80% capacity or it will slow down performance?
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Christmas lights – my mac is controlling them via virtual pc with lightorama.
Check them out here
http://bit.ly/7NB2KP
Here’s a list of some programs that you can download for free from versiontracker.com or find via a google search to supplement the software that comes with your mac. Continue reading »
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