how to

Make Your Mac Go Faster

        When you say, "faster" what do you mean? What is faster?  Both Allen and Harry are here to help!
        Allen Laudenslager refers us to an article from Mac360  which "gives an easy to understand overview of which areas of Mac performance affect how fast your Mac feels and looks.
        "It also reviews a product called SpeedUp and reports that any speed gains are negligible and in fact all the stuff it does can be done with freeware from other sources. Mac360's opinion is save the $40 bucks."
        Check out their list of 6 ways to make Mac go faster.
        Harry Morel sends this info from Popular Science, August 2009, page 68, "On a Mac, go to System Preferences/Accounts, and disable the culprits under the Login Items tab. To tidy a particularly congested OS X, download OnyX, which clears unnecessary data your browser has saved to the hard drive and performs other system-maintenance tasks. Finally, if your computer has less than two gigs of RAM, consider buying more. That will speed everything up."

Cleaning Tips

        Need to clean the mouse or the computer?  Thanks to Harry Morel for bringing this to our attention.  He writes, "You can google how to clean an Apple-mouse scroll ball. A young man in Germany videoed himself disassembling the mouse and hand cleaned the ball and its contacts. Others did similar things. The following procedure is as simple as it gets.
        TIP: How to clean an Apple-mouse scroll ball with minimum effort.
1. Get a shallow bowl. Put the mouse in it upside down so the scroll ball is in the deep end of the pool. Weigh it down to counteract the cord.
2. Pour in enough 91% isopropyl alcohol so you think it submerges the scroll ball (you can’t see the scroll ball, so you have to estimate).
3. Let it soak overnight.
4. Left the mouse out keeping it upside down, and slap it against a thick towel until no more evidence of alcohol remains.
5. Let it dry out some more. Then use it. (You can place a vacuum cleaner hose around the scroll ball – keeping it upside down – and turn it on. It only takes seconds to dry the inside of the mouse.)"
        For info from Apple on cleaning your mouse and computer read this short article, heeding the cautions.  Note the link to a QuickTime movie demonstration.

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Turn Off "Ping"

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Here's a suggestion from Jim Hamm.  "If you have no interest in participating in the music social network "Ping" (which I don't) in iTunes '10, here is an article on how to turn it off (which I did)."
     Questioning Jim about his opinion of changes in iTunes '10 he informs us, "It seems fine to use, with slight differences than the prior version."  Macworld describes the changes here.

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New to the Mac? Already Experienced?

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        Here's a helpful resource suggested by Art Gorski,  "Macworld has started a new email newsletter for folks switching to the Mac."  
        If you're already a regular Mac user check out Macworld's website and their new Insider newsletter which advertises, "ad-free + content rich" at only $19.55 if you're a current magazine subscriber or $39.95 for new members.

How to Speed Up Your Mac

        John Carter writes, "The easiest way to speed up your Mac is to replace your existing hard drive with a solid state hard drive, but it’s not the least expensive way by far. Check out the video on the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro here."The best way to speed up the boot up time and the time to launch an application on the Mac is to install a solid state drive. The new MacBook Air is an example of this. "Another way to speed up your Mac is to attach an external hard drive and reconfigure your swap space (aka Virtual Memory) to use that external hard drive instead of the internal hard drive. There are two ways to do this: 1) the easy, costly way, and 2) the complicated, free way. "(For a quick review of the advantages of moving the swap space to another drive or partition, look here. NOTICE: SwapSwapVM is now available for Yosemite.) "The free way is NOT recommended as it involves using Terminal commands. Mistakes in entering the commands could prove fatal to the Mac. Take a look at two such procedures here and here. These articles are provided to give you some background on why you would want to move your swap space away from the primary boot disk on your Mac. "The costly way is only $34.99, and it comes packaged as part of MacTuneUp from MacWare (for Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4 or higher). See John Carter’s review on this software here. This is also the safest way. You can use MacTuneUp to move the swap space to another physical hard drive or to a separate partition on the existing hard drive. (MacTuneUp cannot repartition a hard drive.) "Re-partioning the primary hard drive to put the swap space in a separate partition is not as effective as moving the swap space to a separate physical drive, but is still a viable way to improve the performance of your system. There are few software applications that will safely repartition the primary hard drive without erasing all the data on it. One such application is VolumeWorks. Instructions for manually re-partitioning the primary drive that also destroys all data on it can be found here. Don’t worry. If you follow the instructions carefully, your system will be restored to what it was before you re-partitioned the drive, especially if you use Time Machine to restore from. If the primary hard drive is to be repartitioned for the purpose of moving the swap space to a different partition, that swap space partition should be the first partition on the drive. "For a more efficient usage of swap space, the partition that the swap space is on should not be used for any other purpose. The recommended size for swap space is at least 3 times the size of your internal memory (RAM). This means that the swap space partition can be very small, but probably should not be smaller than, say, 20GB for a system with 4GB RAM. "Finally, you can use a flash drive for your swap space, but that flash drive, if used like this, can NEVER be removed from your system. For a system with 4GB RAM, you would need a 16GB flash drive. That flash drive can be any kind, but the best kind would be a Class 10 SDHC. "All that said, there is one, simple way to improve the access time to any file on your Mac, and that is to change the preferences setting to NOT put the hard drives to sleep when possible. If the hard drives are spinned down, it takes time to get them up to speed before you can access any file on that drive. Even if you move your swap space to an external drive, if your hard drives are spinned down when they need to be accessed, your Mac will be slow. You change the settings for this in System Preferences —> Energy Saver. The figure below shows the preferred settings when the system is on Power.

"The Wake for network access is only needed if your Mac is serving a website or if you are sharing files on your Mac with other computers in your home. "If you’re using a laptop in battery mode (or an iMac in UPS mode), you really should be putting the hard disk to sleep when possible. The figure below shows the settings for this.

"It would be nice if Apple provided a way to spin down selected drives, such as the one used for Time Machine, and leave the others running."  John concludes with, "(The images above are for Snow Leopard settings on an iMac.)"

How to Print Help Screens

Here's a how-to from David Passell:  "I may be describing what everybody already knows, but often you will get these multiple-link Help screens from Apple applications. To get a printout of a Help screen, click the down arrow next to the wheel and you get a drop down menu:

"You can click on Print and you will get a printout of the help screen. In addition to this, if you find the screen will print too many pages, simply click on 'Make Text Smaller.' Your screen text will be smaller, and the printout will use up fewer pages. All Help screens provide this capability. Help screens from many other applications also appear to use this scheme."

Setting Up a New Mac

        Setting up a new Mac for someone? Jim Hamm has found some good info:  "Here’s what David Allison did for his son’s new Mac before he went off to school. These tips could be useful for anyone setting up a new Mac. Of course, this is just David’s opinion on the apps he likes. You may have other favorites as well.
http://www.davidalison.com/2010/09/setting-up-new-mac-for-college-student.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+DavidAlisonsBlog+(David+Alison's+Blog)
or, Open in new window
or, Click Here
        Jim goes on to explain, "You’ll note I provided three links to the same website. The first one is too long, for my liking, so I normally shorten a long link using TinyUrl (http://tinyurl.com/). That’s the second URL above. But, I thought I’d try another method of shortening a long URL, just for the heck of it. You can do it right in Mail. Open up a new message. Then, copy the long URL address into the Clipboard. In Mail do a Cmd + K. Paste the long URL into the dialog box. Then click OK. The long URL will appear in the new message. Click after the first letter (h) in the URL and type something like "Click Here”. Then delete all other letters in the long URL, including the first “h”. You’ll then see the third short URL as shown above.
        "Yes, this is a bit of extra work, but it goes quickly once you do it a few times. And, it looks a bit fancy with that extra touch to make your email look nice. Admittedly, not a 'biggie.' but fun to do."

Look What's Inside

        From 2006 to the very latest in 2010 here's a look at what's inside 57 Apple products.  What caught my eye was this article about the new Magic Trackpad.  AppleInsider shows the innards of MacBook, iPad, iPhone, iPod, and more.  There was one little problem: clicking to go on to page 2 didn't work.  An email to their webmaster Kasper Jade was nearly instantly replied to and fixed.
        Curiosity led to the iFixit site.  They show you how to troubleshoot, they sell parts, supply repair manuals, help you recycle all sorts of things.  They invite you to contribute your knowledge.  Interesting!

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Mac Virus Carrier

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        Since there are no viruses that infect the Mac, why would you need a virus checker for your Mac? De Prez Allen Laudenslager gets our attention. He explains, "Well as Alexis Kayhill at Mac360 points out; if you get email and attachments from Windows PC users, your Mac could be a virus carrier."
        "What?"
        "A carrier - meaning that when you forward that email, you could pass a virus to your PC using friends. The author recommends the free ClamXav virus checker for Mac. I just finished downloading and running ClamXav. The directions presumed a little knowledge, but not bad at all. In my case the report came back with no viruses found, so at least I'm not passing any problems on to my friends still using PCs."

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Word - Firefox Problem Solved

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"I just needed to update my version of MS Word for Mac and had a real problem installing the XML reader," begins De Prez Allen Laudenslager.  He goes on to explain the problem and the solution. "When I contacted Microsoft for help, they told me that using Firefox might be the problem.

"While this sounds weird, the tech 'thinks' that Firefox somehow doesn't always properly attach the correct file extension name. Word documents are .doc and updates to applications are disk image files .dmg, etc. That file name extension allows Mac OS and the various applications to decide how to handle the file. One example would be when you double click on the file your Mac knows to open the file in your word processor or in iPhoto or whatever.

"I went back to the site (mactopia.com) using Safari and downloaded the file a second time and was able to properly install the update and open the latest MS Word version files with the extension .docx.

"Just one more trick to keep in mind if you are having trouble downloading files using Firefox as your primary web browser."

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More on Easier to Read

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In addition to CMD-+ and CMD - to enlarge screen, there is another way which can be used. David Passell walks us through the process:  "The Firefox Browser has a way to change the appearance of a web site.  (Double click to enlarge these illustrations.)

1. Go to system preferences.

2. Select Universal Access and the Seeing tab

3. Turn Zoom ON

4. Click on Options and set up similarly to below. You can experiment with other settings. If you are going to do this select 'Show Universal Access....' so you you can quickly return to the preference to make changes.

If you are using a Mouse with a scroll wheel, you will see keys to press while you scroll. NOTE: for an unknown reason OPT (or ALT) and CMD seems to be my default; and I cannot change it. (CMD and Shift also has worked on occasion.)

After you do this you will find you can hold down the keys and as you turn the scroll wheel the image will zoom out. Release the wheel and it stays zoomed and you can move around the enlarged screen to parts no longer visible.

Hold down the keys and scroll the other way until the getting-smaller stops. Then you are back to normal viewing.

IF YOU ENCOUNTER ONE OF THOSE WEB SITES WITH STRANGE COLORS AND TEXT COMBINATIONS AND ARE USING THE FIREFOX BROWSERS (e.g. Black text on red, purple on blue, etc.) you can get rid of these quirks with Firefox menu selection: View > Page Style. then change from Basic Page Style to No Style.

As an example our Newsletter normally looks like this in Basic Page Style:

After changing to no style, it looks like this:

The Opera browser has a similar selection which is titled Author Mode (= Basic Page Style) and User Mode (= No Style).

 I haven't been able to find any equivalent selections in Safari. Does anyone else know if such exists?"

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Make It Easier to Read

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Missed today's PMUG meeting?  Here's today's handout:

Make It Easier to Read. You Can Even Listen to It.

Do Command and + to enlarge the screen view of the page you’re looking at. You can do this 7 times to make the type REALLY big. Do Command and - (the minus sign) to reduce the size of the type.

Does some site have white lettering on a dark background? Want to make it easier to read? Do Control and Option and Command and the number 8. You don’t have to touch all four simultaneously. It toggles to the opposite. Toggle the same to go back to the original look.

You’re writing something, and you need to make it easier on your eyes. Enlarge the type as above, maybe even changing the type font. When you’re ready to print it out change the type font and size of type to the look you want in the finished product.

You can print out something from a website in larger type, but notice the preview view of the page. You may need to go to landscape mode, instead of portrait mode, to get the page from margin to margin printed. Print one sample page first and make needed adjustments.

See a nice, big Preview before you print. Do Command + P > PDF > Open PDF in Preview. Click Print at bottom of that page.  (Double click on illustrations to enlarge them.)

Using Pages 09 you can click on Inspector, go to T, and put more space between lines, not just space, space-and-a-half, and double space. You can also put additional space between paragraphs, using Inspector.

You can even put more space between the characters you’re writing.

Distracted by all that stuff in the background of your computer window? Do Option and Command and U to Enter Full Screen. Everything blacks out except the page you are writing. Do Esc to return to regular view.

Would VoiceOver help? Find this under Help on the Finder menu. VoiceOver provides an interactive Quick Start tutorial.

Hear your computer speak selected text?

Go to the main Help menu. Type in Speech and there you'll find useful directions.

Go to System Prefs > Speech.
Try the various choices.
Click on the Question Mark for a list of options and some helpful descriptions.

When you’re using Pages do control click on highlighted words to bring up Speech, Start Speaking. The voice speaks those words out loud.

Hear your mail. Go to Mail > Edit > Speech and listen to what you’ve selected.

Whatever  . . .  Mac makes it easy & fun & productive!