If, for some reason, you decide to pull a key off your MacBook (or in my case, BlackBook) keyboard and can’t figure out how to put it back on, there’s a great little walk-thru on flickr. Here’s a link to the set or you can watch the slideshow below.
By the way, there’s plenty of good reasons to pull a key off your keyboard (cleaning being one of them). If you just pull it off because you’re wanting to avoid doing other work, just look at the pictures below instead. It’ll save you a lot of hassle.
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.
I have a iBook G4 — 1.33 GHz — 512 MBRAM. 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).
This ol’ laptop (Dell) of mine is slowly dying (CMOS battery, CD drive is dead, other wonky stuff). So, of course, I’m pondering getting a MacBook before I head back to Africa in February since I’ll be gone for four months. I guess my biggest question is MacBook vs. MacBook Pro (I like the glowy keyboard in Pro) … but for a basic/average user, do I need what the Pro version has to offer and is it worth the extra cost? I guess the other thing I wonder is would you recommend a refurbished one from the Apple website or stick with a new one?
