drive

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about a system not loading past the gray Apple screen, an external DVD player not working, how to switch to internal speakers with headphones attached, and trouble enabling X-Ray folder view in the Finder. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: System not loading past the gray Apple screen MacFixIt reader Greg asks:

Recently, cloud-storage service Box was offering free 25GB accounts to new customers.

I meant to write it up, but other things got in the way. Good thing, too, because now Box is offering free 50GB accounts to new customers. My foot-dragging is your gain.

Before I go any further, take note that the signup page says "Dell Exclusive Offer." There's no indication you need to actually be a Dell customer or employee or anything like that, but there's always the chance Box will get flooded with unintended/unwanted sign-ups and decide to end or even rescind … Read more

People who need to access your shared MS Office documents via a SkyDrive link should now find the process a bit easier.

Using Microsoft's Office Web Apps or Office 2013, you can create a URL of any document that you store online. You can then e-mail that URL to anyone who needs to view or edit your file. Previously, that process required your collaborators to sign in with a Microsoft account before they could tweak your document. Now that restriction is gone.

Users who receive the URL to your document can click on it to view the file in … Read more

Is the Surface Pro a tablet or a laptop? Well, let's put it this way: benchmarks put it squarely in the laptop category, leaving Apple and Android tablets in the dust.

Chip review site Anandtech ran benchmarks on the solid-state drive in Microsoft's new Surface Pro tablet, underscoring the performance gap with the flash drive in Apple's iPad 4.

It's a "full blown" SSD, wrote Anand Shimpi of Anandtech, referring to Micron Technology's C400 solid-state drive in the Surface that Anandtech tested.

The Micron SSD posted speeds of 400 megabytes-per-second when reading data … Read more

The Thunderbolt technology can be applied to a lot of things, but currently, the most popular use is in storage products. In this regard, it's similar to USB 3.0 but offers about twice the transfer speed, and you can also daisy-chain as many as five storage devices together using a single Thunderbolt port without degrading the data rates.

Despite the fact that Thunderbolt has gone multiplatform, most Thunderbolt storage devices are geared toward Macs. And their pricing, while progressively getting lower since Thunderbolt was first introduced a few years ago, is still quite high when compared with USB … Read more

With the 128GB iPad, Apple is obviously trying to steal thunder from Microsoft's Saturday roll out of the Surface Pro. But that doesn't mean you can equate the iPad's disk performance with the Surface Pro's.

Apple's carefully-timed release of the 128GB iPad ostensibly puts the iPad's storage on par with Microsoft's 128GB Surface Pro, which will go on sale Saturday.

Well, not quite.

Apple is using a flash drive optimized for power efficiency, while Microsoft's solid-state drive favors speed -- the same kind of drive used in ultrabooks. (And Apple's MacBooks, … Read more

I have always been a big fan of the Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. In the show, Guy Fieri travels around the U.S. looking for small restaurants with a flavorful menu. After getting hooked on the show, each time I travel I try to look up local spots featured on the show, but navigating the Food Network site can be a chore (especially on a mobile device).

Over the weekend the Fan App for Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives for iOS was brought to my attention. This app is exactly what I have always wanted. At one point … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about cleaning up a Mac to keep it optimized, external drive permission errors, increasing the number of recent documents stored in the system, and options for triple-booting OS X with Linux and other operating systems. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: How to clean up a Mac to keep it optimized MacFixIt reader Angel asks:

SkyDrive or Dropbox? That's a decision many people face when seeking online storage. But Steve Ballmer doesn't see much in the way of competition.

In a chat with BusinessWeek published yesterday, Microsoft's head honcho touted his own company's online audience over that of Dropbox.

SkyDrive had more than 200 million users as of October, according to comments from then Windows president Steven Sinofsky. DropBox reached 100 million users in November.

"Well, you've got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually," Ballmer told BusinessWeek. "We've got … Read more