If you bought a Mac on or after June 8, 2009 and before Decem­ber 26, 2009 that doesn’t have Snow Leop­ard (Mac OS 10.6) on it or included in the box, you can send in a claim form and get a copy of Snow Leop­ard for $9.95USD. Click here for full pro­gram details or on an appro­pri­ate link below.

Links for Snow Leop­ard Up to Date program

If You Pur­chased Your Mac from the Apple Online Store:

• US Cus­tomers
• Cana­dian Cus­tomers (English)
• Cana­dian Cus­tomers (French)

If You Pur­chased Your Mac from an Apple Retail Store or another Reseller (i.e. a Cam­pus Com­puter Store):

• US Cus­tomers
• Cana­dian Cus­tomers (English)
• Cana­dian Cus­tomers (French)

Alter­na­tively, you can down­load the order form (PDF) and mail or fax it in your­self. Once you’ve sent it in, you can check the sta­tus of your order here.

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

Jared asks:

I have been using Pages for a lot of my desk­top pub­lish­ing needs while on my Mac, how­ever, I still need peo­ple in the PC world to view my doc­u­ments. I have been using the Export func­tion quite a lot and noticed that it does not have a short­cut key next to it. What is its short­cut key?

This is a great ques­tion and actu­ally a prob­lem that I have encoun­tered when using other pro­grams. As I love to use short­cuts I find it rather annoy­ing when the one com­mand I use the most doesn’t have a short­cut. The solu­tion: Cre­ate one yourself.

Click here to con­tinue read­ing about how to cre­ate your own shortcuts

When I bought my first Mac sev­eral years ago, it took a while to fig­ure out how to do all the stuff I already knew how to do on my PC. While I am a techie, geek and Mac Addict and spent the time fig­ur­ing this stuff out, there’s no need for you to have to search around to fig­ure these things out on our spank­ing new Mac. To help you with the tran­si­tion for all those new Mac own­ers out there, I’ve put together a quick guide for Mac new­bies mak­ing the big switch.

The fol­low­ing is a list of things that stick out from when I made the move to my first Mac. So if you’re delv­ing into Macs for the first time, the fol­low­ing should come in handy.

Click here to con­tinue read­ing Switch­ing to Mac 101