MacZot.com is a site that fea­tures daily deals related to Mac soft­ware. Today they’ve got a deal going on what looks to be a great lit­tle tutorial/manual for switch­ing from Win­dows to a Mac: mac­ZOT » “It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac.”

It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most inno­v­a­tive learn­ing tool ever cre­ated for “switch­ers.” It’s all about teach­ing you the Mac by con­nect­ing the dots to Win­dows equiv­a­lents. When the instruc­tor, Saied, teaches you one of the more than 30 lessons on the Mac, you can then instantly try it on the vir­tual Mac that’s built into the learn­ing tool–an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence unique to “It’s About Time.”

It’s com­pat­i­ble with Mac and Win­dows so you can check it out even if you’re just think­ing about switch­ing to a Mac.

Direct link

Vanessa asks: I really need to get some back up Hard Drive. I’ve heard I need at least 3 HDDs. is that what I use? Also what brand or mem­ory space do you think is required?

On a mac the best back up is a exter­nal firewire HD and then set­ting up time machine. Time machine is Leopard’s built in backup solu­tion and you will need to have Mac OS 10.5 installed to use it. When they say you need 3, they are talk­ing about hav­ing 3 dupli­cates of the data you want to backup. 1 on local machine + 2 Backup HD’s = 3 HDs.

If you want that much stor­age I would rec­om­mend some­thing like the WD mybook mir­ror edi­tion. Like this one above, which is avail­able at Costco for $329. While it may seem like way too much HD space, if you have alot of movie, pic­tures or music you will find a way to fill it up fast. Plus if you use the “Mir­rored” mode you will actu­ally only have 1TB of stor­age as the device had 2 HD’s inside and when you set it up it will mir­ror the dri­ves. This is how peo­ple get the 3 HD’s backup. If one of the dri­ves dies inside the backup the other one still has every­thing on it and you are fine.

How­ever you could go the cheaper route and just buy an exter­nal HD with one HD and you would still be okay. Any­thing bet­ter than no backup is better.

The last option, which I am cur­rently using at both work and home, is to buy an Apple Time Capsule.

While you are only get­ting 1 HD for backup pur­poses, the unit also func­tions as your wire­less router at the new stan­dard “N” speed. It also has a USB port to add a wire­less printer or expand the HDD space with another exter­nal unit. The ben­e­fit you get from back­ing up to this unit is that you never have to con­nect a devise to your mac­book or iMac as it is done wire­lessly. In the past I had been back­ing up with a reg­u­lar USB exter­nal HDD, how­ever, some­times I would go 10–20 days before I would remem­ber to backup. While this never really got me into major trou­ble, I did learn my les­son when a HDD recently died and I almost lost data that would have been backed up, had I con­nected my exter­nal drive. Luck­ily I was able to res­cue the needed files. The Apple Time Cap­sule comes in a 500GB, and 1TB size and cost $329 and $529 respec­tively. How­ever, you can find them cheaper from the Apple Refur­bished Store.

Kevin writes:

I have a iBook G4 — 1.33 GHz — 512 MB RAM. It’s run­ning really slow. Do you have any “quick fixes”? I was look­ing on the inter­net and saw that “anacron” was sug­gested. Do you guys have any sug­ges­tions. I don’t really want to buy a new mac (yet) so any sug­ges­tions would be appre­ci­ated. thanks.

There’s two areas you can look at when try­ing to speed up a com­puter: hard­ware or soft­ware. If your Mac is run­ning Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) or ear­lier, then some­thing like Anacron or Onyx (my per­sonal favorite) work really well for clean­ing up your machine. If your com­puter is run­ning Mac OS 10.5 or later, then you don’t really need these pro­grams (at least for the rea­sons that they’re usu­ally recommended).

Read the rest of this entry…