When you plug in a second monitor to Macintosh computer, it may display an exact copy or ‘mirror image’ of what is on your first display.  This is called mirroring.  This is fine if you are doing a presentation and you want to see on your laptop screen exactly what is on the projector,  but it’s not very useful at home to have the same thing on both screens. If you’d like to see different things on each screen, so the second screen gives you more desktop space, you need to turn mirroring off. Here’s how.

1.Go to’ system preferences’  in the Apple menu,  and then to ‘ displays’  and  click on the ‘arrangement’  tab.

2. Deselect the box that says ‘ Mirror Displays’

3. You have now turned off mirroring and should have two separate desktops!

NOTE:

On some machines,  for example lower end of iBooks and iMacs,   to differentiate them from the higher models, Apple have disabled the ability to have two separate displays so that your external monitor is permanently mirroring what is on your main monitor.

There is a program that can re-enable this feature to turn on the ability to have a separate second display.  It’s  called  screen spanning doctor. It automatically checks that your Mac is able to run a second monitor and then makes the appropriate changes. You can download it from here.

When you are researching buying a mac there are a few things to consider, one of them is speed! There is a great site by primate labs which collates speed tests according to model and ranks them. This was useful for me when I was thinking of upgrading my four-year-old Mac pro to a new Mac mini, only to find that my old Mac pro was faster! Check out how fast the new mac-pro’s are  - insane – I wish I could justify buying one!

Another very valuable site is everymac.com which compares each Macintosh model with the models that came before it. The ‘what are the differences’ section  at the bottom of each model is particularly informative.

Finally, there’s the official Apple specifications page which can also come in useful,  although I prefer everymac.com.

I purchased mine from RIHAC in Melbourne, Australia. They have a good unit, with good instructions as well as good phone support, the sell the CIS system for about $150 and it comes with I think it was 100ml of ink per color. Installing the CIS system is about the same complexity as changing a pushbike tyre, or sewing a button on a shirt. If you can follow instructions, you should be able to install it OK. Mine’s been going about 2 years now with no problems at all.

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.

2. Manually backup 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.  So if your computer crashes you need to insert the original DVD and restore from at the old Time Machine backup. This can take hours.

The second method is more complicated, but the advantage is that your backup will be bootable. If you hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup you can boot off your backup drive. This means that 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 the second method of manually backing up using Super Duper. When I wrote this article originally I used Super Duper, but I use CCC now. I like it better. No reason why.

I  have an external drive that I backup to monthly, so that if worst comes to worst and my entire computer crashes, I can be up and running again in minutes. (I actually have two, and I store one off-site with a friend, alternating each month)

To make a bootable backup you need to:

1. Buy an external hard drive
2. Format the hard drive
3. Download some backup software
4. Backup your Hard Drive
5. Run the backup software often

Now let me explain those steps in more detail.

1. Buy an external hard drive

You need an external hard drive at least as big as the hard drive on the computer you are intending to back up. Eg if you have an 200G hard drive on your imac, you should get at least an 200G for your backups. This way you will always fit your backup on the external drive.

2. Format the hard drive

Plug in your new hard drive. Run Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Select your new Hard Drive in the left pane, and in the Erase tab check it says ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ as below, type in the name you would like to call it (eg Backup) (here it says Untitled) and press Erase. It will now erase and format your external Hard Drive ready for use and call it Backup.

If you have a large external drive, and you want to backup more than one computer to it, then it is best to ‘partition’ it into two sections, one for each computer. To do this select the disk in the left pane and click on the partition tab. Select ’2 partitions’ and adjust to the size you want. Again, name them, make sure they are both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and press Partition. In the example below I have partitioned my hard drive into two, one for backups (80G) and one for other stuff!

3. Download some backup software
Go to http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and download the latest version of SuperSooper. It’s free to be able to do a basic backup, or you can pay if you want extra features such as incremental backup (it’s faster, but the end result is the same). Copy Superdooper to your macintosh applications folder.

4. Backup your Hard Drive

Select your Macintosh HD in the left menu, select your new firewire drive in the right one, select ‘backup – all files’. Press copy now, go and have a cup of coffee while you wait a long time for it to copy all your files, perhaps up to an hour or so.

It’s good to select ‘Repair permissions before copying in the options tab, see below. This makes sure your OS X is functioning well before you back it up, otherwise there can be some problems.

5. Run the backup software often
The most important thing about backing up is to do it regularly, I do my main backup  once a month – but Time Machine is also doing it hourly. It’s a good idea to do a backup before you install any new system software in case something goes wrong in the installation so you can go back to what it was when you backed up.

How do I use the backup in an emergency?

• Plug in your external drive. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.

OR

• Plug in your Hard disk and Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.

You are now running from your backup, and you just repeat the sections called Format the hard drive and Backup your Hard Drive but treat your Backup as the main one and the main one as your backup. In other words, run Disk Utility and erase your Macintosh HD, then run Superdooper and backup from your Backup to Macintosh HD. When the backup is finished, select Machintosh HD, and restart. You will now be running from your main computer again.

You might want to print these instructions out, so they are handy in an emergency. It’s no use having the instructions on how to boot in an emergency on your computer – you won’t be able to read them. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it!

Here’s an article on how to use time-machine.

All Apple computers ship with 1 year international warranty. You can extend this to a 3 year applecare warranty anytime in the first year – before your original warranty runs out. If you are not sure if you macintosh is still under warranty, Apple keep a central record of all macs and you can check out if your computer is still under warranty by entering your mac serial number here. If you are buying a second hand mac this is a good way to check the warranty on it as well.

You can get your serial number by going to the Apple menu, About This Mac, More Info, and then you can copy the serial number from there and paste it into the Apple site.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

There’s no doubt about it – Macs are great computers, but they re not cheap, and it’s hard to find them on special! What you may not know is that you can buy iMacs, Macbooks, Macbook Pros, Mac Minis –  almost the entire Apple range,  refurbished from Apple, often at reduced prices. I always buy my Macintoshs  from the Apple refurbished store rather than new  from a retail store.  In my opinion the computers at  the refurbished  outlet  are BETTER   than a new one – as well as being cheaper!  Here’s why, and here’s some tips on how to go about  getting one.

If you go  to the official Apple store webpage (the Australian one is here) ,  and scroll down the  far bottom left there is a  small link  called ‘refurbished mac’.

RELIABILITY:

These are computers that have been returned with a problem. This  problem has been fixed, tested, and now they are being resold. Sometimes they are current models. Sometimes they are older models. I have even bought a refurbished product which appeared to be totally new and un-opened – I assume it was excess stock after a new model was released.

If you look at the graphs of when macs fail here you will see that most Macs, if they are going to fail,  have a problem in the first year. My hunch is that a number of these  break in transit or  develop a fault in the first few days. If you buy a new  computer from the Apple Centre, you don’t know whether you’re going to get a Machines  with a fault,  whereas if you buy a refurbished computer,  it’s already failed,  and been repaired, and fully tested. I  know people who have bought a new Macintosh from Apple and had problems with it and had  to send it back for warranty repair in the first few months.  Buying a refurbished computer  may give you less chance of that happening –  the computer is already ‘ broken in’  yet it still has a one-year warranty from the day you buy it!

PRICE:

The price of a refurbished mac can vary, sometimes it can be 21, 30 or even 50% off the retail price! At other times it can be MORE EXPENSIVE! ( This happens when the price of a model is reduced –  and the Apple refurbished store still has the price from before the price reduction.)

For example this 27 inch imac  currently for sale is an absolute steal –  AU $1700. They begin at $2199 in the Apple Store:

On the other hand, this 24 inch is way overpriced at AU$2429 – that’s $239 MORE than the NEW 27 inch i3 model! This  is because the large iMacs are cheaper than they were a year ago. The ‘save $570′  is a saving off what the price used to be,  not today’s new price.

It’s also worth comparing the specs of the  refurbished mac with the current model. The best place to do that is at everymac here or the apple spec site here.

A refurbished Macintosh  comes with a standard one-year warranty and is also eligible to receive the extended  three year warranty,  so long as you upgrade it in the first year.

You can even save on the purchase of purchase an applecare warranty if you look around. For example a 3 year Applecare for an imac in Australia costs $AU268 but I found one on ebay for US$84 – under half the price. Applecare is international so you can buy it in any country and use it in any country. You just need to register it online with Apple when you get it.  As always, be careful what you buy from eBay, but if the seller  is PayPal guaranteed,  it’s hard to go wrong. The same can be said for software,  I just purchased iWork off eBay for $24 instead of $129, and 3 yr applecare for my iphone for  US$29 instead of AU$99.

Finally, it can be cheaper to buy memory for your Macintosh after you purchase it,  and I have  previously written an article about this here. If you live in Australia there’s often some good pointers to mac bargains here.

You’ll then be given a screen that displays your processor speed and how much RAM is installed.

This Logitech presenter is great. After using the ATI remote wonder for a year or so, and a Microsoft cordless mouse also, I’ve done a bit of research, and came up with these little units as the as the best in my opinion. They are $79 at Officeworks and have all the features you need…

• a long range.
• works with keynote or powerpoint.
• the battery display indicates that the remaining battery life with little bars, so you’re not caught out with a flat battery. 
• the forward and back controls click, so you can feel that you have pressed them.
• if you have a time to end by, eg you are presenting to a group on a timetable, you can set up the timer, it gives you 5 min and 2 minute vibration warnings.
• It has volume up and down which automatically work on the mac with no setting up.
• the usb receiver stows away in the transmitter, and it all comes in a little padded pouch.
• it doesn’t need any drivers for Macintosh, it just works!

 Unfortunately, because it doesn’t need any drivers, you can’t program the keys to do what you want them to do, and the blank screen key doesn’t work. You can download the shareware program USB Overdrive to re-map the keys to do anything you want.   The side view shows volume buttons.  the ATI wonder remote is still better as a remote control for the DVD player  and itunes applications, as it has more buttons, but this Logitech unit is more reliable and simpler.

1. Go to your Applications/Utilities folder. (Click on your desktop so that the finder is active then hold down Apple-Shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)
2. Open ‘Activity Monitor’ – it will probably be the top-most application in the Utilities Folder.
3. Press Apple-1 to make sure that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.
4. Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using. It will look something like this:

There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have available to use –  the higher the better.  If you have no free memory you should get more RAM.

A Page out  means your computer has run out of memory and had to use some of the Hard Disk instead of RAM. (This is the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up some headspace) This DRAMATICALLY slows down your computer.

To quote from Apple:

Moving data from physical memory to disk is called paging out (or swapping out); moving data from disk to physical memory is called paging in (or swapping in)… Extended periods of paging activity reduce performance significantly; such activity is sometimes called disk thrashing.

Tip: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full).  Adding more RAM may reduce page outs.

Some Examples:

Here's a mac with plenty of RAM (12G) - lots of Free RAM (green) and zero Page outs.

Here's a mac with just enough RAM (8G) - a relatively little Page out Count (339MB) and some free memory (green).

Here's a Mac that needs more RAM (it only has 640M!) - note the High Page Out Count (1010524) even though it currently has some 'free' RAM.

This Mac definitely needs some more RAM! Practically no free memory AND High Page-out Count. (1GB!) Performance will be suffering badly. I would add at least another 4G Ram, maybe 8G more to bring it up to 12G.

In OSX Leopard rather than giving a ‘count’ of page in and page outs, it gives a size in GB  of the amount of RAM that has been paged in or out. The numbers are smaller but the same principals apply.

In OSX Lion there is a new entry called ‘Swap Used’. (See the last picture above). This  is a count of how much Disk Space your computer is using as RAM and it’s a good rough estimate of the minimum amount of  extra RAM you need. Eg If your Swap used is 4G then get AT LEAST 4G more RAM.

Where to buy more RAM.

If you do need more memory  I recommend buying it from Crucial. They have good prices and reliable RAM. I’m in Australia and it usually arrives in about a week. They have a great memory lookup tool for all Apple Computers where you choose your model and it shows you exactly what memory you need.  The memory chooser tool looks like this:

First choose ‘Apple’ where it says ‘Choose Manufacturer’

Secondly select your mac when it says ‘select product line’ (e.g. iMac or Macbook etc)

Finally select the exact model (e.g. Early 2011 i7 27″ iMac”)

It will then show you the options you can buy.

Click here to go to the Crucial memory website.

The symptoms of the fault are as follows:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Here are the results of a survey I conducted here on macintoshhowto.com over a period of 6 months regarding the affected models. It appears all models are affected.

In this article I described the fix for this G4 logic board fault. This survey was to test what models were impacted.