Guide to Mac, iPod, iPad and iPhone news and reviews
Perhaps one of the worst threats your Mac faces is the chance of being doused with water or other liquid: In a second, a cup of coffee could leave you about $1500 in the hole for a new Mac (plus $5 for another latte).
Unfortunately, warranties for …
For some users, “organizing files” in the Finder begins and ends with creating folders and moving files into them. But there are a bunch of other things you can do to manage your files in OS X that, whatever your workflow, will make things way easier.
When you perform a standard Finder search by pressing Command-F or using the search bar in any Finder window, you can save this search as a smart folder by clicking the Save button in the top-right of the window. This will save the search as a Smart Folder which, when opened, will only show the files that match your search criteria. (You can also create smart folders by selecting New Smart Folder from the File menu.)
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If you’re like most Mac users, you probably don’t give your keyboard much thought: You press a key, it relays that key-press to your system, and that’s all there is to it. But there can, in fact, be much more to it, if you take avantage of OS X’s support for multiple keyboard layouts.
When you initially set up your Mac, the OS X Setup Assistant gives you the option of choosing a default keyboard layout. Many users never deviate from that initial choice. You can, however, choose a different keyboard layout any time you want. For instance, if you’re composing in French, you might be better off using AZERTY instead of the standard QWERTY. Same goes for composing in non-Roman alphabets, such as Chinese or Russian: You can switch your keyboard layout to any number of those. And many users prefer to use the Dvorak (or other alternative) layout for more efficient typing.
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For most of us, Wi-Fi has become our preferred way to connect our Macs to other networked devices and the Internet. However, most of us also have times when those connections slow down or fail altogether. When that happens, however, there are several things you can do to diagnose and (ideally) fix the problem.
The thing to remember about Wi-Fi is that it’s a form of radio: Signals are passed to and from your Mac and your router (and any other networked devices) by transmitters and receivers at both ends tuned to the same frequency. While the information being sent might be digital in nature, the medium it rides on is analog. As such, the ability to transmit and receive data via Wi-Fi is dependent on two things: the strength of the signal between those transmitters and receivers; and the volume of interference—unusable “noise”—from other devices using that same frequency.
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The RAM in your Mac is in essence the active workspace of your computer, in which your programs run and your content is created. Because of this, healthy RAM is vital for properly running any software on your Mac, be it the system software that comes with OS X or third-party programs.
Unfortunately, if the RAM in your Mac is faulty, those faults can sometimes persist undetected for a while, only to crop up unexpectedly and result in a crash, hang, or other unwanted behavior. Therefore, it is good to not only be able to identify faulty RAM, but also be able to properly test for it and then be prepared to fix the problem, if it arises.
If your system’s RAM is not working correctly, then you will likely see one of several symptoms when using your Mac:
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The system menu bar in OS X is usually fully accessible, either by moving your mouse to the top of the screen and clicking on it or by using hotkeys. However, there may be times when that menu bar stops working: It may disappear or stop functioning, items on it may be grayed out or frozen, or your cursor may show the spinning beach-ball when you hover your cursor over a menu bar item. Here’s how to troubleshoot the problem when any of those things happen.
Whatever the specific problem, the first thing to do is to check whether the frozen menu is the result of a third-party add-on, such as Dropbox, LittleSnitch, Evernote, or the like. You can determine this by hovering your mouse over each menu item for a few seconds. If only one item produces the spinning color wheel when accessed in this manner, and the others are still functional, you’ve isolated the problem. You can further check this by opening Activity Monitor to see if any hanging processes (highlighted in red text) correspond to the frozen menu item.
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When troubleshooting your Mac, you often need to get information about your system and what’s going on inside of it, either to help you identify and fix the problem yourself or so you can convey that information to others who might help.
One tool that can help with this is a utility that used to be called System Profiler but as of OS X 10.7 (Lion) was renamed System Information. By either name, it’s a handy app that lets you look up all kinds of details about your system’s hardware and software, from the serial number and firmware version of your particular Mac to information about peripheral devices attached to it.
You can access this system profiler in a couple of ways. One is to go to Applications > Utilities and find System Information (or System Profiler if you haven’t upgraded lately) and open the program directly from there. Or you can open the Apple menu, click More Info, then select System Report.
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