2008 April - Interrupt19

The Simplest, Easiest, and Cheapest Way to Transfer Files between PCs and Macs

Apr 28th, 2008

by David Balogh in Maintenance and Repairs

OS X Fileshare Icon Photo courtesy of OS X
Moving files back and forth between a Mac and a PC is actually simple, yet can be extremely confusing. Forget burning ten DVDs or sixty CDs. Don’t spend all day transferring 40-50GB of data on a 1GB USB drive. Most important, don’t spend $50 on special software. I’m going to show you how to do it easily for free.

Five Easy Ways to Increase the Longevity of your Laptop

Apr 24th, 2008

by David Balogh in Maintenance and Repairs, Work and Organization

MacBook Air - Closeup by Dan Taylor Photo courtesy of Dan Taylor

Four years ago, I bought my first iBook. Before that I was a Desktop guy. It used to be that if you wanted power – get a desktop and if you want something basic, yet portable – get a laptop. This is partially true, desktops are still more powerful yet laptops aren’t so basic anymore. With laptop sales outpacing desktop sales, more people want that portability. Here are five tips to help your laptop last as long as it can.

Prevent Identity Theft and Snooping by Securely Erasing Your Old Hard Drive

Apr 21st, 2008

by David Balogh in Maintenance and Repairs

Preparing hard drives for the home network by Jeff Wilcox Photo courtesy of Jeff Wilcox
Data lives on long after you empty your trash can. With simple recovery applications, newly deleted files may be recovered and opened. With more sophisticated programs, files you deleted years ago may be recovered and read. With all that we do on our computers now, our hard drives are full of personal and confidential details. When you sell, donate, or otherwise get rid of an old computer, you are going to want to securely erase all data from the drive before getting rid of it.

DivX and Xvid on OS X – How to Watch Online Video

Apr 17th, 2008

by David Balogh in Games and Entertainment

MPlayer, VLC and Perian Photo courtesy of MPlayer, VLC, and Perian.

Video online is huge and its going to only get bigger. As quality increases, so does the filesizes and bandwidth requirements. To get around these barriers, compression is necessary. Just like .mp3 for music and .zip for files, two methods of compressing video are DivX and Xvid. Let’s learn how to watch DivX and Xvid video under OS X.

9 Ways to Green your Mac

Apr 14th, 2008

by David Balogh in Basics for Beginners

Icebreaker by Angela7 Photo courtesy of Angela7

Environmental responsibility is everyone’s responsibility. With that in mind, here are nine tips to reduce your computer’s impact on the environment. These tips are platform universal, you may use them just as easily on a Windows or Linux machine.