Silvermac

If you are one of a numerous victims of MacBook and MacBook Pro hard drive failures, there is a glimpse of hope that you can still have your data recovered. It involves removing the hard drive from its enclosure, from the computer in this case.

Removing the hard drive from a MacBook is a breeze, it takes good part of a few minutes.  However, MacBook Pro owners will need some bravery, surgical precision and, of course, lots of time. Be aware that opening the MacBook Pro will definitely void your warranty.

Sometimes the drive heads get stuck in a parking bay and consequently your hard drive fails to read or boot. There is no clear indication that would help distinguish between this and the genuinely dead hard drive, but since it’s not working anyway, you can still give it a try. Often this fixes the issue.

Remove the hard drive from your computer and hold it on the palm of one hand. Give it one flat-handed brisk slap on the top of the drive. Just one. Then place it back into your computer and see if it worked.

If it’s still dead then it’s bad news. If it works – you have a decision to make; leave it as it is, and continue with your life like nothing ever happened, or get the data off the drive as soon as possible and get a replacement drive. It’s really up to you.

You’ve also learned about the benefits of backing up, so go on and get that external drive, they’re cheap as chips now, and back-up, back-up, back-up …

This is the summary of some tips for new Mac users I have posted in my blog over the past 18 months. If you are new to Mac, I would recommend you read them, you may find some of them very handy, a few maybe quite fascinating.

Installing applications on Mac is somewhat different to the installation you may have experienced on Windows. While some new users struggle to get it at first, it is incredibly simple and easy. [details]

The Dock provides easy access to some of the applications on your Mac, displays which applications are currently running, and holds windows in their minimized state. But if you see it only as a pretty strip of cool bouncing icons, then you’re dead wrong. There is so much more to Dock then you could imagine. [details]

What’s the jelly bean’s job in OS X – We all know about that jellybean on the top right corner of OS X windows. And we also know that clicking it will toggle the toolbar on and off. But what if we wanted to customise the toolbar even further. [details]

Shortcut to Desktop – Sometimes, when saving the file, we’d like to have it saved directly to the Desktop, but the option provided by OSX points somewhere else. This explains how to save the file to desktop in one keystroke. [details]

Accessing menus – If you come from Windows world and are used to using menus, you may feel a little strange that you can’t do it on Mac. Actually … you can. [details]

Zooming the screen – One of the great features of OS X (10.4) is that you can zoom in the screen, perfect when viewing small images. [details]

Slideshows in Finder – Imagine you have 80 photos on a CD and you’d like to preview them all. You can either double-click on each one to open them in Preview, import them all to iPhoto, or simply use Slideshow in Finder. [details]

Changing icons in OS X – There are trillions of beautiful icons for Mac out there, so why not use them, you can replace your default icon in a few simple step. [details]

Screen capture and text clipping - One thing I couldn’t live without is the screen capture, lets you select an area, window or full screen. And capturing text is even easier, just select and drag away. [details]

Switching windows and applications – Many new Mac users are slightly disappointed that Cmnd+Tab (Ctrl+Tab on Windows) is actually switching between applications and not between the windows, as they used to do in the Microsoft world. But there is something else that works even better. [details]

Other things you may find useful are Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts and Most popular Mac applications, as well as few handy tricks such as invert screen and slow motion.

One thing many switchers to Mac hate is not being able to access the menu via keyboard shortcuts. For example, in Windows Alt-F gets you to File menu item, Alt-T to Tools, Alt-V to View, and then you select from there.

There is no such thing on Mac, but there is something else, and not many new Mac users know about it. It’s Control-F2.

Go ahead and press it, then watch your Apple menu.

It gets highlighted and you can do the rest with your arrow keys. And it works in all applications, so just select the application you want with your mouse, or Command-Tab on your keyboard, then press Control-F2 and you’re in business.

This is one of the first things I have learned when I switched to Mac, and I thought it may be handy to any new Mac users out there.

Sometimes you would like to save the file to your Desktop. Once you click on File | Save as in your application menu bar, the save dialog box appears offering you one location, usually the Documents folder.

Of course you have a few options what to do, you can save it there, you can click on the drop-down menu and select one of the most common locations, or you can click on a little triangle icon and open the Finder mode.

But if all you want is to save the file on your desktop, simply hit Command-D (Apple-D) on your keyboard, and the save location will automatically change to Desktop.

In one of my previous posts (Full screen on OS X) I have written about Megazoomer, a very useful piece of software that lets you maximise your window to a full screen size.

Just press Command-Enter, and the front-most window grows to fill your entire display. Megazoomer was only available for PPC platform, but now there is also the univesal binary. See details and download from Ian Henderson’s website.

Also, thanks to Eddie for pointing out something that I have completely forgotten to write about – OS X zoom feature. From about 10.4.7 or 10.4.8 Apple silently introduced a new feature to Mac OS X – screen zoom.

Just hold the Control key down and scroll your mouse wheel up, and your screen will zoom in. Scrolling the wheel down will zoom out. On Mac notebooks you can hold the Control key down and scroll the trackpad with two fingers (what’s this called – twin-scroll?) to achieve the same.

There are a few ways to increase text size on Mac, but to zoom in the graphics, e.g. small image on the website, this is just perfect solution.

What is Mac OS X Dock ? It’s the beautiful thing on the bottom of your screen, the thing you either love or hate, but the thing you can’t live without after you’ve been using it for a while. It provides easy access to some of the applications on your Mac, displays which applications are currently running, and holds windows in their minimized state.

What are these icons ?

The icons are representing applications you have on your Mac. Some have been placed there during the OS X installation, others are placed there by the user. Sometimes you will see the little black triangle, just below the icon, this means this application is running.

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