Keith asks:

My Win­dows XP PC kicked the bucket, but its hard drive is fine. I bought an iMac; how do I get my doc­u­ments from my PC’s hard drive to my new Mac?

You could net­work your PC and iMac, but your PC is fried. I rec­om­mend buy­ing a 3.5 inch hard drive enclo­sure that has a USB or FireWire inter­face on it. Take the hard drive out of your PC, install it in the enclo­sure and attach it to your iMac. Voila! There’s your hard drive! You can copy what­ever impor­tant doc­u­ments you have to your Mac.

This process is extremely easy; don’t get intim­i­dated by the task of doing surgery on your old PC. Look on the bright side: you don’t have to put any­thing back together!

Once you’re done, for­mat the hard drive using Disk Util­ity (it hides in Applications>Utilities) and you can use it as extra stor­age on your Mac.

*Note: Make sure your hard drive is com­pat­i­ble with the enclo­sure! Most desk­tops man­u­fac­tured in the last year and a half use SATA inter­face while older ones use the IDE (or PATA) inter­face. Take a quick peek at the cable and com­pare it with the afore­men­tioned arti­cles.
**One last thing: You can do this with a lap­top hard drive as well; just buy a 2.5 inch enclosure.

Cur­tis asks:

I bought a new drive and am par­ti­tion­ing it to limit how much Time Machine uses. How big should I make the partition?

Short Answer: I’d say around 25% larger than what your computer’s hard drive size.

Back­ing up is SO impor­tant, and Apple’s new oper­at­ing sys­tem includes a very pow­er­ful and easy to use appli­ca­tion called Time Machine. All you need is an exter­nal drive to backup to, and you’re good to go!

To under­stand how much space you need, you should know how Time Machine works. The first time you backup, it backs up your whole hard drive. From then on when it backs up your com­puter, it only backs up what you’ve changed. Once your backup drive is full, you can set Time Machine to delete old backups.

My lappie’s drive is 120GB and my 160GB backup drive is EASILY big enough!

If you aren’t deleting/adding tons of files on a daily, or even weekly basis, a backup drive that’s slightly big­ger than your hard drive, like 25%, is more than enough. That being said, hard drive space is CHEAP, and you’ll never wish you bought some­thing smaller — A 500GB USB 2.0 drive from Future Shop is only $119!

Cas asks:

What is the short­cut key to force quit an appli­ca­tion on a Mac?

Short answer: ⌘ + option + escape

Long answer: Although many Mac zealots would say oth­er­wise, Apple Mac com­put­ers are not per­fect. Occa­sion­ally, appli­ca­tions will quit work­ing and you’re stuck star­ing at what I like to call, “the Rain­bow wheel Of Death”, or ROD for short. You’ll know him when you see him!

Often, a lit­tle patience will pay off and the appli­ca­tion will resume, but if you know it’s crashed, or you’re impa­tient, force quit the appli­ca­tion. Hit the key combo above, and the ensu­ing dia­log will list your appli­ca­tions AND tell you if one is not respond­ing. You can even force quit (or relaunch) the finder through the force quit dialog.

Alter­na­tively, you can also find “Force Quit” under the apple in the title bar, or by hold­ing the left mouse but­ton on the guilty application’s icon in the dock.