This article does not endorse opening your Macs for upgrade. This is simply a description of the upgrade I did on my my own personal machine. Upgrading your Macs will always be your own choice and therefore will be done at your own risk. In our previous article we talked about upgrading the RAM on your Mac. This article assumes that you have ordered the correct RAM modules for your Mac. If you have your RAM, a small philips (cross) head screwdriver and a cloth / napkin close by, you are [...]

Before I bought my first iMac almost a decade ago, I was a steadfast PC guy (though not in a “I’m a PC” kind of way). I spent hours and hours upgrading video cards, changing hard drives, and motherboards. I suppose it’s the nerdy equivalent to souping up a cool car in your garage. One of my initial reservations about buying a Mac was the lack of “upgradability”, as most of the components of an iMac are not user upgradable at all. But there are [...]

With iCloud, you can view your iPhone photos on a number of different computers. You can throw huge numbers of photos into your Photo Stream to view on different devices. But what if (like me) you have over 10,000 photos in your iPhoto library? You can’t be placing all of these photos into iCloud? More often than not, you will be keeping your photos on a single machine. In my case, that’s my lovely trusty old iMac. I have ALL my photos and music on [...]

Although I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) for many years, there was for me a feature that was lacking. In the past few years I have moved away from connecting hard drives physically to my computers, choosing instead to link my external hard drives to my Airport Extreme Base Station. This means that all the Macs in my house have access to the external hard drives. I of course do Time Machine backups of my Macs using one of these hard drives, but I don’t Time [...]

  Backing up seems to be an often discussed matter here at Macstarter. You can just imagine, the amount of digital “stuff” we are going to be amassing throughout the rest of our lives is only going to increase. With photos, music, TV Shows, movies, and even books going digital, we are going to have a tough time making sure it’s all safe. Of course, you can back up to the cloud, but just the amount of data we seem to be generating on a [...]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/purplemattfish/ The questions I’m asked most about, when discussing Macs and computers in the general, are about keeping files safe, or rescuing lost files, or trying to open damaged files. The one thing that all of these things have in common is having backups of your files. The other day, I was talking to my sister in law, who is starting a photography business. As she is now generating thousands of pictures a month, the need for backups is (for her) mandatory, not optional. Macstarter [...]

With versions, Apple is moving us away from the old era of PC use. We haven’t yet seen iCloud released to the general public, but I’m guessing when it comes, it’s going to be a game changer, not least because we may actually see an end to saving and backing up. A s I type this article on my iPad, I’m struck by the lack of File > Save or even my beloved cmd + S! I’ll simply close PlainText (that wonderful iPad App!) and [...]

Having upgraded to Lion on the day it was released, I was struck with just how easy it was to download it from the Mac App Store. All in all, it has to be the easiest upgrade I have ever done .What happens though when I need to install it on a different machine, or want to reinstall it on my own machine? Well, you could download it again. But weighing in at 4GB or thereabouts, this isn’t something you want to do every other [...]

In the previous article, we talked about the Font and Colour palette on your Macs. Today, we’re going to talk about one of the coolest features you’ll ever see on a computer, and it’s something that Macs have been able to do for decades! Let’s say you’re working on a brochure or leaflet in Pages. You’ll have put text, shapes, images and other things to make your publication look beautiful. But what if you are working with custom colours? There should be a way of [...]

Being a teacher of design, I find myself obsessing over colours on a daily basis. Macs were really the first personal computers to give you great fonts and colours, and is the reason why to this day Macs find themselves sat in front of creative people like designers and publishers. But there’s a lot more to choosing colours on Macs than you would first imagine. Let’s take the simplest program on the Mac: TextEdit. If you open it up, you’ll know you can type words [...]