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 [...]

Solution to MacBook Pro that won’t wake from sleep

We have found so many forums with owners of MacBook Pros ( MBP ) suffering from the following issue: 1. The MacBook Pro goes to sleep either by closing the lid or just by virtue of time. 2. Upon trying to wake the MacBook Pro, you get a black screen with or without the spinning beach ball [...]

Humor: Windows Vista

Humor: Workaholic

Solution: iTunes 8 error -3256

We were getting this iTunes 8 error: An error occured while connecting to the remote speaker “XYZ”. An unknown error occured (-3256). We use a 3G iPhone running the app “Remote” to connect to iTunes and control the music. But we couldn’t connect to our Airport Express speakers over the wireless network. The solution? Open System Preferences: Network: [...]

Mac epiphany

Perhaps I should categorize this post under “Things that make you go hmmmm”. My wife has always been a PC person. She is an Assistant Principal, and is close to a power user with Outlook, Internet Explorer, Excel, Word, all the usual suspects. She has always preferred the PC and has used my Macs with some [...]

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 [...]