Meh, get a one-button mouse. The second button is just control-click. I never understood why it was so important to have another button. (I disable the second button on my mice.)
Buy a larger keyboard. Seriously. I don’t know if you guys have used the out of the box keyboard for the new iMacs. My wife noted, “it is so cute!” and it is. I think it giving me carpal tunnel it is so small. Plus I find it very hard to type accurately.
Fair complaint, sausage-fingers.
A friend recommended buying, “Toast” as the one stop burn/convert everything software. Any others can speak to this?
I get by with free software (Handbrake is my friend) but Toast is teh awesome. Especially if you’re new to the platform. Easily worth its price.
I agree with 1 completely. I assumed I would be at least slightly interested in the MightyMouse. I was not. I got my 8-year-old Intellimouse Explorer and used it until it stopped working. I replaced it with another a few months back.
I absolutely love my Aluminum keyboard. It’s the right size, I like how thin it is, the short travel distance for a keypress (I know that sound ridiculous, but I love it). I find my typing is more comfortable.
I’ve been a mac user for my whole life. My biases are realized really just from growing up with it. I was that kid in high-school that zealously defended in the mac even in the darkest of days when the platform really didn’t have many legitimate strengths (1997, if you were wondering).
I’ve stuck with the Mac though, and come to the conclusion (as many have stated here and elsewhere) that computers are tools, and should be used as such. Get what you’re comfortable with, or if not, get something that works for you.
Best practices for Macs? I don’t have any to list. The OS takes care of most of the work.
That said:
Back up. Back up Often
You can also find the NSA’s guide on securing the mac here (Though the most recent is for Tiger, not Leopard)
I am buying a Cintiq 21UX, and the cost is under two grand for the first time in a long time. Now that can seem like a lot of money to a lot of people (I’ve saved up for it), but I do think you should take another look at Wacom’s new line of tablets! You may be surprised at what you find…
It’s fine that you admit you are not the biggest fan. I almost bought a PC tablet for the same reason, but the resolution of the tablet screens is said to be poor. That, and I couldn’t justify buying a tablet PC for only that reason.
I was speaking with my brother-in-law, a long time Mac user and he told me about, Hot Corners. After I made a joke about Hot Pockets he informed me he can’t live without this function, and now that I have been using it for a few hours, neither can I.
Goto settings and set this up. Basically you can set your screen corners to perform a function if you move your mouse over. My lower right now minimizes all open Windows, Upper right shows all open apps and upper left shows all app windows for the current app. Great function find!
Really? I hate hot corners. Personally, I use function keys to handle different expose modes and what not, although I don’t know if you can assign screensaver to f keys.
Hot Corners is a great feature, unless you use your computer in an ADD-riddled, caffeine-fueled state that I usually am in. I used set of hot corners off constantly, just by trying to move the cursor from here to there. I had to stop using it.
So I have a 2 terabyte LaCie external drive that I used for music and video and to backup the stuff on my Mac laptop. But lately it’s been acting up. I plug it in and my laptop can’t read it, or when it does show up on the desktop it’s unbelievably slow. When I try to play the videos on it, the playback is choppy or it cuts off. So, what do I do? Should I take it in for repair or just get a new one? And now I’m thinking that I should never get another LaCie drive. Are there other brands people have had better luck with?
I strictly use only Western Digital hard drives, and have for well over a decade. I currently have over 10TB worth running and I find them to be the most reliable. I have had experience with many other brands, and while some are also good drives, many more are just not reliable. Now there is a couple of things you can try before writing this one off.
Plug in your drive and turn it on and wait for it to mount. Go to your applications folder and then into your utilities folder and open Disk Utility. On the left side of the screen you should see a list of all drives including the one built into your laptop. External ones usually show up as yellow. Click on your LaCie to highlight it and then over on the right side near the bottom of the screen click repair disk. This process could take a while…like a really long while depending on how bad it is. With a little luck this might fix your issues. If not then…
You could try getting ahold of a disk utility app like TechTool and see if it can help. If not then…
The drive may just need to be reformatted in which case you would need to backup the data to another location. If you cant do that then…
It might be time to get a new external drive and hopefully you will still be able to access your content and copy it over to your new drive.
FWIW, it’s probably not the fact that it’s a LaCie that is causing the issue. There are many many things that can go wrong with a drive and make it difficult for a computer to read.
How old is the drive?
How big of cache does the drive have?
How full is the drive?
