You will have seen that on occasion here on Macstarter, we’ll throw up a YouTube video showing you all how to do things. Screen Recordings are an incredibly easy way of showing other people how to do something on a computer. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a screen recording will save you a heck of a lot of words on top of that. You can pay a pretty penny for screen recording programs, and you get what you pay for. But [...]

I think one of the greatest Apple inventions of all time was iPhoto. Amongst all my friends and family, the one thing that has never failed to impress them is the ease with which you can get a set of photos off a camera, and put them onto your computer. iPhoto though, has hidden depths. Back in the day, when I used to develop my own photos in a dark room (remember those days?), I would create a contact sheet. In fact, if you develop [...]

I signed up to MobileMe a few years ago. I must confess, I didn’t really use the email address that came with it, but I really did rely on the syncing between my Mac and my iPhone. Once my wife got an iPhone, and I got a second MacBook from work, this syncing became vital. Sharing a calendar and an Address book is just fantastic – and makes me think that this is one way computers can actually make our lives easier. I came across a [...]

With Dropbox, iCloud and other cloud services, you’d think that we’d gone past the point of worrying about our files and backups. Obviously that’s not the case, because external hard drives still sell by the millions. Until cloud services can cope with hundreds of gigabytes worth of data at a time, our Music, Photos and files cannot be fully backed up online. More than that, backing up home movies and photos can take forever online, whereas it only takes minutes on a hard drive. When [...]

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 [...]