Backing up your Mac is one of those routine tasks that can wind up buried beneath the more urgent priorities on your to-do list. But if your MacBook or iMac crashes at an inopportune time — as computers always seem to do — you’ll be infinitely grateful you took a few minutes to save all …
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You want to stay safe from hackers while still using an older version of Apple’s MacOS, the underlying software that runs its laptops and desktops. Now, there’s a patch for that. On Tuesday, the company released updates to the Sierra and El Capitan operating systems that will protect users from Meltdown, the design flaw that could let hackers access sensitive …
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I’ve covered shortcuts for Finder, iTunes, Safari and Spotlight. Here are ten shortcuts for general Mac use that didn’t fit in any of the above apps. 1. Command-Q to quit If you are coming to Mac after a long tenure with Windows, then you might get tripped up when you click the red X in the upper-left corner of a …
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Putting your MacBook into its sleep state is a convenient and useful option when you need to step away for a moment. Provided you have an account password set up, sleep lets you lock your MacBook without shutting it down so you can quickly resume your labors upon your return. There are a number of ways — seven, by my …
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Now playing: Watch this: How to make your laptop battery last longer 1:24 My aging MacBook Pro doesn’t hold a charge like it once did. That’s not surprising, since it’s nearly five years old and batteries tend to lose their capacity over time. And the less time my MacBook’s battery lasts, the more I fear I’ll wake up one morning …
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When the hard drive on your MacBook is getting full, you have a few options: You can purchase an external hard drive and offload low-priority files to it; pick up an inexpensive USB drive; or take on the task or replacing internal storage yourself. Or, there’s TarDisk. TarDisk is a small, SD card-like device that expands the storage of your …
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Quick, what is the biggest drain on your laptop’s battery? If you answered “the display,” you’re right — for the most part. The single biggest occupier of battery resources, day in and day out, is your laptop’s display. More specifically, it’s the that energy goes into powering the backlight that illuminates the pixels on your laptop’s display. The obvious move …
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If your laptop takes its sweet time booting up, then here are some things you can do to put a little pep back in its startup step. Get an SSD You can breathe new life and faster boot times into old laptops by replacing spinning hard drives (HDD) with a new solid-state drive (SSD). Without needing to physically spin a …
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If you use a set of external speakers with your Mac, you may notice that the chime you hear as your Mac starts up comes not from the external speakers but from your Mac’s internal speakers. If you’d like to adjust the volume of this startup chime — or mute it altogether (not recommended) — there is way to make …
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