Merry Christ­mas new Mac own­ers! And a spe­cial extra treat for any of you that are switch­ing from Win­dows to your first Mac. Don McAl­lis­ter at Screen­cast­sOn­line has made a free episode of his pop­u­lar video pod­cast avail­able specif­i­cally for switch­ers. Click here to check it out.

And if you find it inter­est­ing and help­ful, I’d highly rec­om­mend you look into becom­ing a full fledged mem­ber of Don’s com­mu­nity. Lots of great tuto­ri­als and infor­ma­tion to help you on your way to becom­ing a Mac genius!

HawkWing.net is a great blog for find­ing tips, tricks and fixes for Mail.app — the default email client on a Mac.

The site was dor­mant for awhile, but recently woke up and has resumed posting.

Inter­est­ing side note, it’s run by Tim Gaden who is Dean of the The­o­log­i­cal School , Col­lege Chap­lain and Stew­art Lec­turer in The­ol­ogy at Trin­ity Col­lege within the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne. He also teaches Greek.

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.

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).

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