Mac Maintenance: Effective Backup Strategies

Everyone knows they need to backup their data, but most people don’t do so regularly (if at all). Backups are confusing and annoying. Besides, who has the time? Well, your perspective may change during a post-crash enlightenment: Most people become religious about backups after their first catastrophic loss of data.

Mac Maintenance: Solve Disk and Hardware Problems

The disk directory is the table of contents for your hard drive. Directory errors build up slowly over time – or quickly after a crash. Such errors can cause problems opening or saving files, and if severe enough they can prevent your Mac from starting up, instead displaying the flashing question mark. Fixing the disk […]

A Quadra with ClarisWorks and Mathematica: All You Need for a Thesis

It was early 1995, and I was a young graduate student in the Environmental Engineering department at Clemson University. I was finishing up my research and desperately needed a computer to produce my thesis on. There were quite a few Macs at the University, but the trend towards switching to Wintel was already picking up […]

Mac Maintenance: Fix Glitches and Sluggishness

Sometimes your Mac just doesn’t seem as peppy as it used to, particularly if it’s been running for a long time. Memory and disk problems are the most common causes of routine glitches and sluggishness, especially the dreaded “Spinning Pizza of Death” (a.k.a. beachball cursor) that never seems to go away. Sometimes RAM and disk […]

TextWrangler Is a Great, Free OS X Text Editor

2007 – For writing at your computer, the ideal tool is word processing software. It lets you play with fonts, type size, boldface and italic – all the tools you need to write a short story, a novel, an essay, a review, whatever. For creating code, the ideal tool is a text editor. It doesn’t […]

iMac (Mid 2007)

Apple gave the iMac a fresher look in August 2007, the first change from the stark white face introduced with the first G5 iMac three years earlier. The new look puts a black border around a glossy display, has an aluminum finish, and is thinner than its predecessors.

24″ iMac (Mid 2007)

Apple gave the iMac a fresher look in August 2007, the first change from the stark white face introduced with the first G5 iMac in 2004. The new look puts a black border around a glossy display, has an aluminum finish, and is thinner than its predecessors.

20″ iMac (Mid 2007)

Apple gave the iMac a fresher look in August 2007, the first change from the stark white face introduced with the first G5 iMac in 2004. The new look puts a black border around a glossy display, has an aluminum finish, and is thinner than its predecessors.

Mac mini (Mid 2007)

Apple “refreshed” the Mac mini the same day it unveiled new iMacs, iLife ’08, and iWork ’08. The updated model finally moves the Mini from the outdated Core Duo to a Core 2 Duo processor, giving it 64-bit capabilities along with faster CPU speeds. Between the newer, more efficient CPU and 8-10% higher clock speeds, […]

Why Developers Love Programming for the Mac

Mr. T is famous for his bad man attitude, as seen in Rocky III and The A-Team (which are among my favorite movies and TV shows respectively). However, in his infinite wisdom, Mr. T produced a series of self-help videos in 1984 that were intended to help young kids as well as show his softer […]

4 Steps for Resurrecting Old Macs

This column began as an email exchange with Sonic Purity in relation to Why Does a Mac Die, Why Macs Die, More About Why Macs Die, Why Some Mac Die: Bad Capacitors, and Aging Capacitors and Tin Whiskers. It has been adapted with his permission.

Original iPhone

Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone in January 2007, putting an end to years of rumors about Apple combining an iPod and a mobile phone.

MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)

The Mid 2007 MacBook Pro came in two sizes. Both use Intel’s Santa Rosa chipset and an 800 MHz system bus (up from 667 MHz). The 15″ was Apple’s first notebook with LED backlighting, and this was the first time Apple offered a 1920 x 1200 screen for the 17″ model.

15″ MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)

The 15″ MacBook Pro became Apple’s first notebook computer with LED backlighting when it was introduced on June 5, 2007. Other than that, the specs don’t seem much different than it’s predecessor.