What would Jason do?

Question from Judy: I’m a struggling user of Parallels and Windows XP for a couple of business programs that STILL aren’t available on my Mac.  Recently I downloaded the recommended by Parallels security utility.  Immediately after I couldn’t get on-line on the windows program.   I have no idea how to sort out what the problem might be – or even who to ask.  Thanks for any help.

Jason answers: Hi Judy!

First off, I would uninstall that security software from your Add/Remove Programs Control Panel in Windows. If the functionality you lost returns after your remove it, then problem solved. If it doesn’t, then something else is wrong with Windows or Parallels. You may need to bring it in to MAC-O-RAMA for us to diagnose and repair the problem.

If you are only using a couple of Windows programs and doing your Internet stuff on the Mac side, you don’t need the protection on the Parallels side. Yes, your Windows OS is susceptible to viruses and malware, but if you are working in Windows with only these business applications and you pay attention to what data you are putting on your Windows side, (don’t accept Flash drives from strangers) you should be safe.

There are other ways to protect yourself from a Windows security breach. You can create “Snapshots” with Parallels. Snapshots allow you make a restorable point of your Windows installation. For example, you could create a new Windows virtual machine, install all your software and set it up to your desire. Then take a Snapshot. Say you get a virus a week later, you can just revert to that previous Snapshot and start working in your clean environment again. Granted, your data for that week will be lost, but you were backing that up, right?

- Jason

Question: So my problem is that a lousy videographer recorded my wedding video and gave me a tacky DVD. I want to be able to download the DVD so I can edit it on Final Cut Studio. The problem is that I don’t know how. I tried ‘mactheripper’ but it gave me a mpg and it only gave my the tacky disk menu the “videographer” used, not the actual movie. I also tried just taking the video_ts files but to convert it I would need to buy something and I want to be sure it’ll work. Plus I don’t want just the tacky disc menu to download like what happened with the ‘macthe ripper’. Thank You in advance.

Jason answers: Hello!

Have you tried Handbrake? It should be able to decode those video_ts files to a format that you can import into Final Cut Pro, plus it’s free!

-Jason

Question from Herb: Need VERY easy to learn house design sw for MAC 10.4.11.  Don’t need all the finishes and furniture. Just 3 D dwgs to scale.

Jason answers: Hi Herb!

There are a few 3D drawing softwares that come to mind:

(Free, Pro version is $500) Google’s SketchUp

(Free) Sweet Home 3D looks interesting

(Standard $50, Pro $150) Live Interior 3D from Belight software (a great software company)

(Standard $120, Pro $250) Microspot’s Interiors

These are all affordable compared to professional 3D CAD programs that cost thousands of dollars. Whether they are easy to use, I am not sure. I don’t use 3D software, but all these products are geared towards non-professionals so the learning curve should not be as steep. You can also download demos of these programs to see which one works for you.

- Jason

Question from Billy: What printers work with the new iOS 4.2 update? Can I just buy any bluetooth printer or does it use something more specific?

Jason answers: Hi Billy! There are only a handful of printers that work with Apple’s AirPrint. The list is at Apple’s AirPrint for iPad page. So why are there less than 15 printers that work with AirPrint? For some reason, Apple only released AirPrint support for printers with built-in AirPrint functionality rather than allowing you to use AirPrint with shared printers on your Mac running 10.6.5.

I believe that Apple will add the functionality to print to shared printers with the next iOS update. For now, there are some third party applications for your iPhone or iPad that allow you to print. If you do a search in the App store for “print” you will see quite a few apps that allow you to print from your iPhone or iPad.

- Jason

Question from “S”: My email accounts are all on a POP server (do not want to go with ‘gmail’ because of Google’s propensity for collecting & storing personal information) and I use Entourage.  Thus, I sometimes need to take a copy of my Entourage-stored contacts and calendar to another computer.  I know Entourage’s export feature; however, where are the emails, contacts, and calendar actually stored on my computer?  Could I just copy them to a flash drive and open them on another Mac?  Thanks, Jason, for this blog – I have been using Macs since my 512 model and have actually learned a couple of new things from the blog.

Jason answers: Hello and thanks for the kind words!

Depending on what version of Office you are running, the folder will be named accordingly. So, for Office 2008, the path to this database is: Hard Disk Name/Users/your_user_name/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/Main Identity

For Office 2004 or Office 2011, you will see Office #### Identities.

The Main Identity is the default identity, but you can have multiple identities. If you have more than one identity, you will see more than just the Main Identity folder within the Identities folder. Inside these identity folders, you will see a “Database” file. This “Database” file contains all your email, email attachments, contacts, and calendar information. It can become quite large, we have seen Entourage databases that are several gigabytes in size.

We haven’t seen this after Office 2008 came out, but Entourage 2004 had some issues with large databases getting corrupted and people losing all the data within them. Again, Entourage 2008 seemed to resolve these issues.

With Office 2011, Entourage has been replaced with Outlook For Mac. Outlook For Mac still maintains the Identies folder, but in addition to the Database, it has an Outlook Data Folder that contains emails, contacts, and calendar items as individual files rather than everything in one big database. You can still move the Identity folder to another computer.

- Jason

Question from Greg: I want to buy a new laptop from a truly knowledgable salesperson (not an $8.00 hr, sales clerk) but I will need to apply for financing. Can that be done through Mac-O-Rama?

Jason answers: If you’re in business, Mac-O-Rama offers leasing services, but we do not currently offer consumer financing. The main reason: Our concern about the interest rates on private label store credit cards! If you purchase through Apple directly using the Apple credit card, that’s probably a decent bet. Also, our friends at the Apple Store know Apple products very well. So they may very well be able to answer most of your questions.

If you need consulting for more advanced issues or have complex or business issues to navigate, you can always make an appointment with myself or one of the other technicians at Mac-O-Rama for a very reasonable rate.

Question from Dave: I have pictures in iPhoto that I want to reduce in size without losing the clarity or any of the picture. How do I do that?

Jason answers: If you want your digital photos to be smaller in file size so that you can email them or have them take up less space on your hard drive, you have to lose information in the image to make them smaller. There is no getting around this.

I assume that your photos are JPEGs. JPEGs are already “compressed”. This means that when the picture was taken, an algorithm was run on the picture to remove information that shouldn’t be recognized by the human eye. Depending on what quality you want, the algorithm will remove or keep more data. When you take real life photos, there are millions of colors that can be described by the computer. Some of these colors are very close and by taking close color values and making them the same value, you make a smaller file without losing clarity since less information is needed to describe all the colors in the photo.

In summary, you can reduce the file size of your photos by opening them up in a photo editing program like Photoshop or even Preview and resaving them as a lower quality JPEG until you get an acceptable image. It is a trial and error thing. In iPhoto, if you select File->Export, then you can choose a Low, Medium, High or Maximum quality image. If you open the file with Preview and choose File->Save As JPEG, you will get a little slider to go from least to best.

Jason

Question from Ed: What is you feeling about never turning off a Mac (or PC)?

Jason answers: Personally, I always leave my computers on. Right now, the only computer I use is a MacBook Pro and it stays on all the time. When I am not using it, the lid is closed and it sleeps. The only time I have had to turn it off is when I am flying with it, which is a couple of times a year. When I owned desktops, they were always on and they didn’t go to sleep.

I want to make sure that everybody knows how to properly shutdown a computer. For Macs, go to you Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen and choose Shut Down… from the menu. On Windows machines, click on the Start button or Windows logo and choose Shut Down from that menu. Many times, we have seen customers hold down the power button until the computer powers off, thinking this is the correct way to shutdown a computer. This can cause data corruption, including a non-booting computer.

With desktop computers that don’t run off a battery, I have always just left them on. I have an iMac at home that has been on for two years straight because it runs some network monitoring software. With laptops, I have left them powered on all the time, but when I transport it, I close the lid and it goes to sleep.

There isn’t a correct answer here. It depends on your usage. We have customers that use a desktop computer for a few hours a day. They power it on when they use it and then power it off when they are done for the day. This technique uses less energy and I don’t believe that it puts a strain on the computer. We have some customers that leave the computer on all the time and let it sleep after it is idle for some time. Other customers will just leave their computers on 24/7 without letting it sleep.

I would say that however you use your computer dictates how you manage powering it on and off. If you want to use less energy, leave it off when you aren’t going to use it. If you want to be able to just go to your computer, use it for awhile and then come back to what you left off with, then set it to sleep after a certain amount of time.

Jason

Question from Ray: I have been using my Mac for several years, and sometimes I have a feeling that it should be cleaned out. I am not sure what the best way is to clean it out, and delete some unnecessary files and junk.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Jason answers: This is a common dilemma. Macs run so well and there is no indication from the Mac Operating System that maintenance needs to be done. What to do?!

First off, if your hard drive is getting full, that can cause slowdowns. So what is considered too much data? The general consensus is to have about 10% free space to not impact performance. We typically get computers in the store that are running really slow or not booting up and they have less than a gigabyte of free space. To find out how much data and free space you have on your hard drive:

1. Click on your Finder Icon in the Dock.

Finder Icon in Dock

2. Select your hard drive icon by clicking on it once. This view is for 10.5 and 10.6.

Hard Drive Icon

3. Go to File -> Get Info in your menubar or press Command + I

You’ll get a window with the details on your hard drive. Notice the Used and Available lines.

Get Info Window

So I have about 20% free space.

What should you clean out? There are some cleanup scripts built into the Unix kernel that run daily, weekly, and monthly. However, these scripts run at strange times like 4am. So if your computer is asleep or off, they won’t run. Since I am up at 3-4AM updating this blog, these scripts run fine on my laptop. If you aren’t up at these times, there is a great piece of shareware called Macaroni. It installs as a System Preference Pane and runs these maintenance scripts when they are needed.

Another piece of software that does maintenance is Onyx. The software is free and will perform many maintenance and cleanup tasks. The Help file included with the software goes into detail on each task it performs. Remember to always have your data backed up before performing any tasks with Onyx.

Addressing “junk” and unnecessary files is very tricky. I can’t tell you what to delete off of your hard drive. The Mac allows users to put files wherever they want. We do see quite a few “Downloads” folders that are full of stuff that the user didn’t realize. Since Leopard (Mac OS 10.5), Apple created a “Downloads” folder that Internet downloads go into. It is in /Users/your home folder/Downloads. Take a look in there are see what you can throw away.

There are a couple of pieces of shareware that will find duplicate files on your hard drive so that you can clean them up. There is a highly marketed one called Spring Cleaning, but it constantly gets bad reviews. Here are a couple that have done well in the shareware community:

Tidy Up!

Find Duplicate Files

Jason

Question from Julie: What is the best program for synchronizing emails between an iPhone, MacBooks and I Mac? I want to be able to fully control account activity from any device and not have to duplicate those actions on any other device.

Jason answers: There isn’t a program that syncs your email across all of these devices (iPhone, MacBook, and iMac) that I know of. To stay synced across all these devices would require a certain type of email account, an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) account.

Essentially, an IMAP account stores your email on the server and your devices stay in sync with email on the server. No matter what device accesses the IMAP account, the device reads the email directly from the server without downloading it and deleting it off the server. You can read, delete, create folders and move messages all on the email server and your other devices will see those changes.

Many email providers give you a choice of IMAP or POP/POP3 (Post Office Protocol) accounts. POP accounts work best when using a single device to check your email.

With POP, when you read your email, it is downloaded and marked as read on the server. Immediately, or after a designated time, the email message is deleted off the server. You can see how this does not work with multiple devices. You would check your email with your MacBook and those messages would be marked as read and/or deleted. If you decide to check your email with your iMac, those messages aren’t there anymore.

We have a lot of customers that have email accounts with AT&T DSL or Yahoo. Unfortunately, they do not offer IMAP access. Charter has started offering IMAP. Gmail and MobileMe also offer IMAP access.

Since IMAP stores email on the server, your IMAP account needs some storage space. Most providers that offer IMAP access give you plenty of storage. Gmail is constantly adding more, but they have more than 7GB. MobileMe gives you up to 20GB. I am not sure what Charter gives you.

In summary, if you don’t have an IMAP account with your email service, then there isn’t a program that keeps all these devices in sync with email. You will need to get a new email service. With Gmail and MobileMe, you can set up an IMAP account and have them check your POP accounts to keep your email in sync.

Jason