"My screen is all white except for this little folder in the middle with a question mark on it. How do I make it go away?" In the background I can hear her restarting her machine over and over.
I'm not a technical person, but I know this is bad, so I say to her "Do you have everything backed up?" She uses her Mac for work.
She doesn't. I have told her over and over that she needs to back up her Mac, told her how to do it, and what software to use (SuperDuper is my recommendation), She always says that she will do so as soon as she can afford to buy an external hard drive. External hard drives are around $100.
When I researched her problem on the internet last night it seems very likely that her hard drive has died. That means she has lost all her applications and data. All her email, all her address book entries, all her photos, and all her calendar entries - not to mention her work documents.
She said, "The staff at the Genius Bar will be able to get it all back won't they?" I told her that if her hard drive is dead there are places that can try and retrieve some of her information but it will cost in the thousands to have it done.
Since she couldn't get on the internet, I made an appointment for her to go to her local Apple store first thing this morning to have them look at her Mac so they can tell her what is wrong.
If her hard drive is bad she may be able to get a new one or she may have to replace her machine. For less than $150 she could have protected all her important applications and information. No matter how good our Mac's are, they are still just machines.
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( 3 / 40 )I was teaching a class this past weekend when one of the attendees told me about a cool little application that allows you to create colored folders and then label them in large letters.
It sure makes it easy to find the folder you are seeking and it is very easy to use.
The app is called FolderBrander. You can find it at http://www.yellowmug.com/folderbrander/
A single user license is $9.95 and a family pack is $12.94. There are versions for OS 10.4 and later and for OS 10.3.
I'm really pleased to find out about this because I keep a lot of working folders on my desktop. You might want to check it out as well.
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( 2.9 / 52 )If you use a computer very long, sooner or later you will accidentally put an item in the trash that you didn't mean to throw away. Assuming you have not emptied the trash, you can get back.
It used to be the case that the only way you could retrieve it would be to click on the trash can to open it, search for the item, and then drag it back onto your desktop or back into a specific folder.
With Snow Leopard there is a somewhat faster way.
Right-click on the item and select "Put Back" from the contextual menu. The file will return to the where it was before you threw it away.
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( 2.9 / 115 )One of the really cool things about the Mac operating system is the ability to deal with a frozen application without the need to shut down your whole computer. In all the latest versions of the OS you can select the Apple Menu > Force Quit and highlight the frozen application and click the Force Quit button.
In Snow Leopard there is an even quicker way to Force Quit a frozen app. In the Dock click option-click on the application icon and one of your options will be Force Quit. Select it and the application will quit.
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( 2.9 / 101 )One of the things I have to do as president of our local Mac users group is make a slide show once a month for our general meeting. As part of that show I like to feature our board members in recognition of all the hard work they do. I do it with a slide show of their pictures. For this new year I decided to add their names to the photos so that visitors could put a name with a face.
I decided to do this because it is so easy to do with the new annotate feature in Preview.
Open your document in Preview. I keep Preview in my Dock because I use it all the time, so I just drag a document over the Preview icon in my document to open it. If you don't have Preview in your Dock you can right click on the picture and select "Open document with" and choose Preview.
Once the document is open choose "Annotate" from the Tools menu.
Across the bottom are all your regular options. If you are working with a pdf document there are additional options like adding a link or a note.
To add the name to good ol' Steve's picture I choose the add text icon and drew a box where I wanted the text to go. To choose the font and font size I clicked on the "Aa" and to select the color I clicked on the color block.
The finished product looks like this. The whole process takes a minute at most.
This has all kinds of uses, particularly the ability to add arrows to pictures and maps.
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