Make Your Own Desktop Pictures

2001 – Isn’t it great to have a cool looking desktop picture in the background when you do your work or surf the Net? Most people like to have a decent picture and have a hard time finding the one they like.

Using Internet Explorer’s Advanced Features

2001 – We explored ways to increase the browsing speed of Internet Explorer (IE) a few weeks ago. As IE offers more than mere “get to the pages” browsing, we want to take advantage of all its features. With IE 5.0, Microsoft has added some great features.

Organize Your Files and Never Lose Track of Them

2001 – Before we get started, let me introduce a new feature to iBasics. I will rate tips in terms of difficulty, from easy to intermediate to expert. As the focus of the column is basics, we will mostly go through easy and intermediate topics, but sometimes an “expert” tip will be useful, especially as […]

Speed Up Internet Explorer on the Classic Mac OS

2001 – Since the release of version 5, Internet Explorer became the Mac world’s number one browser, with many Netscape users dumping the Navigator or Communicator 4.x in order to get Microsoft’s latest offering. In any case, Explorer is very popular in the Mac crowd, and a few of you may want to maximize its […]

Personalize and Customize Microsoft Word

2001 – Hi everybody and welcome to iBasics.* The intent of this weekly column is to help you to tame your Macintosh and get the most out of it, whether it is old or new. Not everybody is a power user who relies on the use of a Macintosh for a living, but everybody wants […]

Battery Amnesia Reconditions Old PowerBook Batteries

This is rather unusual for us – two different Low End Mac staffers reviewing the same software. But what Battery Amnesia does can be so incredible that you might not believe just one of us. (Note that Lithium-ion batteries, which Apple has used since the PowerBook 3400c in 1997, are not susceptible to the memory […]

System Crashes in the Classic Mac OS

1998 – It sounds to me like you’re running the kinds and types of software that can create common crashes. I’ve noticed a considerable number of people on the list that don’t have crashes, but I’m not one of them. There are things you can do to shore up your system from crashes and eliminate […]

Beware ‘Soft’ Partitions

1998 – Long ago, as it has been mentioned, some companies used soft partition software.1 This was an overlay of the hard partitioning format. In some cases, this worked okay, but in most cases, it worked just like Stacker or eDisk2 (for more on these ancient utilities, see Miscellaneous Macintosh FAQ) – sooner or later […]

Serious Classic Mac OS Performance Tips

I have posted my answer to your question to the Quadlist, simply because it’s the most on-topic question I’ve gotten in a while. Contained within my answer are little tips that I think others need to know so that they can get powerful performance out of their machines as well. I have eliminated a considerable […]

Macintosh Serial Throughput: Modem Results

1998 – Your results may vary, but this should provide a good starting point for tweaking serial throughput on your Mac setup. Note that FreePPP allows serial port settings of 115.2 kbps and 230.4 kbps, settings not possible with Apple’s serial toolbox routines. This follows up on our earlier article, Macintosh Serial Throughput, providing real […]