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 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).

As noted on the current version of Anacron:

Note: This version of Anacron will run on MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) but it is not needed, as the Leopard launchd will run skipped jobs when the machine is next awake.

On older (pre 10.5 / Leopard) Macs there was a set of utilities designed to keep your Mac running smoothly that would only run at a certain time of day and if your Mac wasn’t awake/turned on at that time, then the utility wouldn’t run until the next time. For some folks, this might never happen if there Mac wasn’t turned on/awake at the right time — which is where Anacron/Onx came in. They would allow you to automatically run the utilities or schedule them for a different time so that your Mac would get, for lack of a better term, cleaned up.

Aside: How to tell what version of Mac OS you have — click the Apple icon in the top left corner of your screen, choose About This Mac (that sounds familiar?). You’ll see a little screen pop up that looks something like this:

That tells me I’m running Mac OS 10.5.6, currently the latest version.

Let’s assume you have Mac OS 10.5.x Leopard on your Mac. Your next step would be to make sure it’s not just one or two programs that seem to run slow, but rather, that everything seems slow. If you can narrow it down to just one program, for example Microsoft Word, then you might want to check for updates to that program that may fix your problem. If that doesn’t seem to be the issue, then you can look at hardware.

Upgrading the memory (or RAM) on your computer is probably the simplest, and in the case of a notebook, almost your only option. The 512MB your iBook has currently is the minimum required amount of memory for Leopard as detailed by Apple. (Tiger, Mac OS 10.4, minimum required RAM was 256MB). Depending on the exact iBook G4 model, you can most likely upgrade your iBook to 1.5GB of RAM by adding a 1GB stick of RAM to your iBook. Prices will vary, but should be around $60-$80 depending on your location. Install prices will vary as well, but should be in the $30-$50 range. More RAM will help a lot with the “smoothness” of your Mac while having multiple programs running and also helps with more system intensive applications (i.e. iMovie, etc).

Any other tips from the AboutThisMac community?

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?

I’d say that most people really only _need_ the MacBook. Especially the new (as of this posting, October 2008) models. Unless you’re desperate for the larger screen. For the price, I think the MacBook is the way to go these days.

The major feature that it’s lacking is a firewire port which is what you’d use to hook up older (and some current) tape-based video cameras. Pretty much anything else will be able to hook up through a USB port.

There’s this comparison page Apple has for their MacBooks. There is also a great guide over at macrumors.com that can walk you through most of the features on both the MacBook and MacBook Pro models.

The refurb store is just as good as the “new” store. You get a 1 year warranty with most purchases and the machine has been checked out by Apple to be good as new. Although I don’t think they have any of the new (October 2008) MacBooks in there yet.