Mac Lab: An Apple Macintosh OS X, Mac & PC Blog

The truth about external FireWire and USB drives

For years, Mac fans have known that you must have a FireWire external drive for it to be bootable. We have purchased a few FireWire drives, but lately they seem to be harder to find, especially ones with a cooling fan. Our article on the Antec MX-1 enclosure (USB 2.0 and eSATA) forgot to mention [...]

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Portable Applications for your USB Stick

What is a portable program ? : A portable program is a piece of software that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any other computer. It can be your email program, your browser, system recovery tools or even an operating system. The coolest part about it is that [...]

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Two monitors, one computer

If you ever had two monitors on your desktop computer, and that could include your laptop when it is on the desk, you would never go back. First of all, on a Mac, all you need is a second video card, which comes with most towers and laptops. So, let’s say you had two 19 [...]

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Photoshop history options

We’re not sure why this isn’t on by default. In Photoshop, go to the History palette, select the indicated area, and choose “History Options”. Then in the next screen, check “Allow Non-Linear History”. Deleting a “state” deletes that state and those that came after it. If you choose the Allow Non-Linear History option, deleting a [...]

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My email to Steve Jobs

OK, here we go. If I ever sent an email to Steve Jobs, and more importantly if he ever read it, I’d probably do the Mac Fanatic thing and praise the Mac hardware and OS X and go on and on about how much I love everything Mac. Mac Pros, iPods, MacBook Pros, etc. But [...]

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Build a high-quality external hard drive

I just put together an external USB drive and am so happy with it I’d thought I’d share my recipe. I have owned many external drives before, including LaCie external drives, and was always disappointed when I’d open them up. Cheap Maxtor drives, poor engineering, el cheapo parts, not to mention how noisy they’d get. [...]

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