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.

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…

Cus­tomiza­tion of your Mac is one of the best ways to bring your per­son­al­ity to your Mac. And what bet­ter place for us to start talk­ing about cus­tomiza­tion than with the About This Mac screen. Now some of you might not even know where to find this screen. So to begin click on the Apple logo in the top left, and the first item you will see is About This Mac

This is what you will see before you do any customizing.

What we intend to do is cus­tomize the image that you see in this screen. To start goto Finder and locate /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app

If you have trou­ble find­ing this folder you might be look­ing in your cur­rent users home folder and not the root folder of your com­puter. From here you will then need to right click and click Show Pack­age Con­tents, and find /Contents/Resources/MacOSX.tif

Make a backup copy of this file to some­where you can find it, so you can change it back if you want. Then find any new image you’d like, mak­ing sure that the new image is the same size image as the cur­rent one. When you have your image ready, just rename is to MacOSX.tif and place it in the loca­tion above.

To make sure it all works, just Logout and Login again to see changes. Here what I got when I was done. If you get a chance to cus­tomize your About This Mac Screen, we’d love to see it. Just post a link to the image so we can all check it out.

Mikul asks:

Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been run­ning really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not run­ning any­thing. Also, the bat­tery has been last­ing for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?

One thing you can check is the activ­ity mon­i­tor (if you use spot­light and search for Activ­ity Mon­i­tor). Change the lit­tle box up top to say “All Processes” and then sort the list by the CPU option. Chances are some­thing like Safari or Fire­fox is run­ning really high and when you’re shut­ting the lid to put it to sleep, that process is still run­ning even though you think it’s not, which is why the bat­tery isn’t last­ing as long as it used to. If it’s a pro­gram that you rec­og­nize (i.e. Safari, Fire­fox, iTunes) you can select it and choose the stop sign look­ing but­ton that says “Quit Process” and it will fully kill that program/application.

Click here to con­tinue read­ing about how to fix a loud fan/low bat­tery combo