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 Mac pro to a new Mac mini, only to find that my four-year-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 and after. It helps you see any subtle differences between models. 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.

If you want to see how long a particular model has been in circulation check out the mac buyer’s guide run by MacRumors.  This gives you an indication of  whether there might be an upgrade soon.

Once you have decided which mac to buy, don’t’ forget that you can get refurbished macintosh computers from Apple.

This is not for the beginner, it’s quite technical, but here’s how to do it.

Now you could upgrade your entire hard drive but with a 480G SSD drive costing $1579.99, it’s not a cheap option!  But you can upgrade just to a smaller boot drive (a 64G drive costs $119) to run OSX and your applications. This means your system files and applications are on the new SSD drive, but your user data (iphoto, itunes etc) stay on your old Hard Disk.

SSD Boot Drive using a different drive for my user folder - less than half the 64G SSD is used!

An SDD drive looks the same shape as a traditional drive, making it easier to install, but it uses memory instead of a hard disk so it is much, much faster. If your computer is a bit old and slow this may be a better solution than upgrading your whole computer because often it’s not the processor speed that slows things down but the hard drive.

Here’s how to set up an SSD drive to run your OSX and applications off, and keep using your existing hard drive for your user files.

1. Work out how big a boot drive you need.

Everything except your user data will go on the boot drive. To work out how much space you need, do this:

(a) Find your total disk usage. Click on your hard drive and press Apple-I, check how much space is used. For me it’s 587 Gig:

(b) Find your user folder usage. Select your user folder (the onew with a house as an icon – this is where all your documents, music, movies, photos etc are stores) and press Apple-I, it may take a while to calculate it.) If you have more than one user, you’ll need to do it for each folder and add them up. I only have one user and for me it was 550GB:

Subtract (b) from (a) to give you the amount needed for your boot drive.

587GB – 550GB = 37GB.  I need 37GB for all my apps and system software. A 40GB drive would just to it, so I went for a 64GB drive.  I ordered a 64GB M4 SSD from Crucial in the USA  for US$119.

2. Connect the Hard Drive to your mac.

For a mac pro it simply connects into the spare optical bay slot – no adapters needed, a 30 second operation – see how here.
Difficulty: easy – 30 seconds.

For a new aluminium mac mini it can replace one of the internal drives.
Difficulty: moderate – 1/2 hr.

When I replaced the internal SSD drive in my mac mini I needed to pull out the fan and motherboard to get the new SSD drive in! You can get the old hard disk out without pulling out the motherboard but the SSD drives are actually ever so slightly thicker and more uniform in shape so the motherboard needs to come out to manoeuvre the SSD drive in place.

For a macbook or macbook pro you’ll need replace the internal optical drive with your old Hard Drive (OWC who also sell SSD drives provide a kit to do this here) then to put the SSD drive where your old Hard Drive was. The other more expensive option is to order a large SSD drive and replace your old hard drive with it.
Difficulty: hard – 1-2 hours.

iMac: Forget it! Your simplest option is to put the SDD drive in an enclosure and leave it plugged in all the time.

3. Format the SSD Drive using disk utility.

After your SDD drive is plugged in you’ll need to power on your computer and use Disk Utility to format it – Mac OS Extended (Journaled):

4. Copy everything except your user directory onto the new boot drive.

Now you need to copy your system folder and applications onto your SSD drive. You can’t do this by hand – there are hidden files that need to be copied, so use Carbon Copy Cloner. Using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your boot drive as the target Disk and then select Incremental backup:

Now select your main hard drive as the source disk, but then deselect your main user directory so that you don’t copy across all your user data (it won’t fit!)

Click Clone and your boot disk will be created on the SSD disk.

5. Reboot from the new SSD boot drive.

Under System Preferences click Startup Drive select the SSD Drive, then restart! (wow – notice how fast it is!)

Since it is now looking for your user data on the new drive, it won’t find anything and so your desktop and dock will be the default ones and all your files will be missing. Don’t panic – in the next step we will get your old files back.

6. Select your old User folder.

Go to System Preferences, then Accounts, (in Lion this is now called ‘Users and Groups’) then ‘Click the lock to make changes’ and control-click the main user account and click Advanced Options.

In the advanced options tab choose your old user directory, which is back on your original hard drive.

Your computer will tell you that you need to restart, and when you restart you will be running off your new boot drive,with your user directory on your old hard disk.

So how fast is it? Here’s a demo of how quickly applications launch from my new SSD drive…

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

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?

1. Remove all the extra language files to gain a few hundred MB.
OS X comes with almost 50 languages, chances are you only speak one or two. Here’s how to delete the ones you don’t use.
1. Download Monolingual from here
2. Run it and it will remove all the language files you don’t need. It defaults to keeping English, gets rid of Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic etc. (Don’t use the other features of monolingual – just the language removal.)

This will be more useful on an older smaller hard drive, but if you have a drive bigger than 100G you probably won’t even notice an extra few hundred Megabytes.

2. Use Disk Inventory to see where your space is being taken.
You probably have lots of old files lying round you don’t use much, some of them might be very big. This program shows you what is taking the most space.
1. Download Disk Inventory X from here.
2. Run it, go have a cup of coffee – it can take a while.
3. Look at the results, they will be a picture like this:

You can mouse over the colors to see which files they are on the hard drive, and then manually delete the folders to create free space. I found lots of thinks I did not need with this program, like old movies hiding away, folders full of microsoft junk, etc. Don’t delete anything if you don’t know what it is though.

3. Clear out your Library/Application Support folder
Have a look in your Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder and there may be some old folders from applications you have deleted but no longer use. You can delete them.

4. Clear out your Printers
This is like the languages, but for printer drovers. OSX comes ready to work with hundreds of printers, chances are you only have one or two. Have a look in Macintosh HD/Library/Printers and delete any folders for printers you don’t need. For example the Epson library contains 1.4Gig of files – yet I don’t even have an Epson printer!

5. Manually delete files
The slow but hard way to make more space! But there is a trick to speed it up. To see how much space a folder takes, go to Menu ‘View/Show View options’ then select the box that says ‘calculate all sizes’. Then sort by folder size by clicking on the size heading in the window. You can now see which folders take the most space.

When you are finished deleting files empty the trash. This deletes them totally from your hard drive and frees up space. While they are in the trash they still take up space. Be careful, there’s no way to get them back after you have deleted the trash!

Movies take up the most space, if you delete them they will free up lots of space.

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.

To submit your site to google go to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add your web address, then wait a couple of days.

do the same for yahoo, msn etc

To see if google already knows about your site type site:http://www.yoursitename in google search

If you want your page to go up in the search results, you need to have other people link to your site from their site.

To see how many sites link to your site type link:http://www.yoursitename in google search.

The more entries here, the higher you will be in the search result, basically that’s a simplified version of how it works.

With so many different battery types, how do you know whether to recharge them or flatten them every time you use them, and does it matter?

It does matter. Some batteries can be damaged if you use them wrongly, others have a reduced life. Here’s a quick guide.

• Lithium Ion Batteries (Li-ion) are found in all new Apple laptops and ipods. They are also in digital cameras and mobile phones. The more you keep them charged the better. It’s best to never let them run out. They only last about 300 full discharges, so if you let them run totally flat you have used 1/300th of their life. It’s best to charge them as often as you can. Whenever you are not using them put them on the charger. Keep them cool while charging.
• NiCad batteries are exactly the opposite. It is best to let them run totally flat each time you use them. They are found in older cordless drills, older laptops and some cordless phones. If you recharge them before they are fully flat they will ‘remember’ where you discharged them to. So if you keep charging them when they are half empty, you’ll find they will stop working when they are half empty.
• NiMH batteries are like Nicad batteries but the ‘memory’ effect is not as bad. You should still discharge them fully but it won’t hurt them quite as much if you don’t. If you cant’ do it every time, try to fully flatten them occasionally.
• Car batteries (lead acid batteries – also in some camcorders) are the worst for being damaged when fully flat. Every time they go fully flat it does irreversible damage – 3 or 4 times and they will be totally wrecked. Like a lithium ion battery, it’s best to keep them as charged as fully you can.

This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!
To reset it open up a Terminal window. (from Applications/Utilities) and paste the following line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

press return wait about 20 seconds, and your open with menu will be fixed.

I think this only works on 10.4 and it may reset some other things to, like what applications open certain files.

Due to limitations in the QuickTime Architecture, AVI video files containing MP3, WMA or AC3 audio tracks will not play directly in QuickTime based applications. You may experience stuttering, loss of sound, no sound or an error message.

We have written a useful application called “DivX Doctor II” which can fix these problems, and other issues QuickTime has with AVI files. You can download DivX Doctor II from http://doctor.3ivx.com/.
Here is the direct link to the file:

http://www.3ivx.com/codec/DivXDoctorII2.2.sit