macs

Getting to a particular Preference Pane on a Mac is a two-step process. You must first open up System Preferences (via the Dock or Spotlight) before opening one of the preferences contained within. With free Mac app Preferences Quick Launch, you can shorten this process to one simple step. It lets you drag individual Preference Panes to your Dock or Launchpad, where you can access each directly.

After downloading Preference Quick Launch, unzipping it, and moving it to your Applications folder, open it to reveal 27 applications, each of which opens a Preference Pane. You can drag any of these … Read more

One of the new features touted by Apple in its upcoming OS X 10.9 Mavericks operating system is the multiple display management features that allow better integration with full-screen applications. However the new features come with other changes that, for some people, and especially those with more than two displays, may be a bit of a hindrance.

Recently an individual by the name "MrThaiBox123" posted on YouTube a small look at the new desktop management features in the current developer preview of OS X 10.9, which outlines the benefits as well as the drawbacks of these … Read more

Apple's new MacBook Air has adopted faster solid-state drives made by Samsung. But Apple won't be the only beneficiary.

Samsung announced Monday that it has started mass-producing new PCIe solid-state drives aimed at the next generation of ultrabooks. SSDs that use a PCIe connection offer faster speeds than those outfitted with SATA (Serial ATA) connections.

As one example, Samsung's XP941 SSD can read data sequentially at 1,400 megabytes (1.4 gigabytes) per second, the highest speed offered by a PCIe 2.0 interface. In the real world, that means the drive can read 500GB of data … Read more

Apple products aren't perfect, but they get a lot closer than most.

One reason for Apple's success can be summed up nicely in the 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina.

At first blush, it seems uncharacteristically pedestrian and unrefined for an Apple product. It doesn't have the usual Apple panache or design boldness. And it's thicker -- despite being smaller -- than the 15.4-inch Pro Retina. … Read more

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

This week, readers asked questions on how to fix a problem with the system crashing whenever printers are accessed, how to get custom or manually installed fonts to appear in Microsoft Office, and where the wireless monitoring windows went in the system's Wireless Diagnostics utility.

I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Printer access crashes the system. MacFixIt reader jmackane asks:

Apple's CoreStorage disk encryption technology has a small bug that will keep a disk unlocked, even after it has been ejected from the system.

In OS X Lion, Apple introduced a drive management technology called CoreStorage. When enabled, CoreStorage will create a "logical volume group" out of one or more physical drive partitions, and then create usable "logical volumes" from this group to serve as storage for your system. This setup allows the logical volume to span multiple physical partitions (as is seen with Apple's Fusion Drive), and support features like encryption for Apple'… Read more

If you are a Safari user then you might be familiar with the program's Bookmarks bar, where you can save links to individual Web pages, or group them as collections in folders.

You can also use it to save any other location you can link to through Safari's address bar, including files and folders on the system.

To do this, simply drag a file to the address bar, and you should see a bookmark to it as you would any other file. You can also load some files such as images directly into Safari by dropping them on … Read more

While deleting files in OS X simply involves moving them to the trash and emptying it, this routine does not remove the data of these items, but instead only clears the directory entry for them. The content of the items is kept on disk with the system having no way to access it; as a result, there is potential for the content to be scanned and recovered by data recovery tools.

To prevent this from happening, you can use secure-erase features in OS X, one of which is to securely delete the files in the Finder by choosing this option … Read more

Surprise, surprise -- after a year's dry spell, new hardware from Apple is causing an unusually high amount of interest in people selling off their old Macs.

That's according to gadget trade-in service Gazelle, which says the number of people wanting to sell their old MacBooks is up 8 percent from the same time last year. Perhaps not too coincidentally, this is all happening following Monday's unveiling of new MacBook Airs, which hadn't been given any hardware updates in a year.

The majority of trade-ins are older models, Gazelle's "Chief Gadget Officer" Anthony … Read more