Dave, I purchased a used macbook from a friend and need to change the Home Icon (House) name from his to mine, but I can't find information anywhere to do this. It is driving me crazy. Can you possibly assist?

I need to be able to send my parents a copy of some documents I have in PDF format, but I want to ensure privacy and encrypt them first. Is there some easy way to do this?

Okay, I bought a new Time Capsule from the Apple Store and it's a great wireless base station but... I want to use it for Time Machine backups too and am a tiny bit lost on how to get that set up. Can you help me out?

I'm a busy guy, constantly doing twenty things at once. I am also a heavy user of Google Calendar and find it annoying as heck to constantly have to get to the Calendar page before I can add something to my schedule. Is there some neat Mac gizmo I can run so I can click on it, type in my appointment, and be done with it?

I've never had this problem before: I upgraded Firefox on my Mac OS X system and now any time I'm on a page with a "mailto:" link, those links are not clickable. Any other sort of "href" works fine, but email links do nothing. I looked through the preferences, but nada. How can I fix things?

I'm a recent convert to Twitter (thanks partly to your own twittering, actually!) but can't decide between the two major apps on the Mac: Twhirl or Twitterific. Which do you use, and why?

I used to program my TRS-80 in BASIC when I was in high school, and took a class in Pascal in college. Now I want to try to write applications for my Mac but don't know where to start. Help!

I am going to be selling my 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4 soon. I would like to sell it with some of the programs included (Office and Adobe CS2 - I figure I should make a few extra bucks including them) but without exposing any personal information. What's the best way to do a thorough cleaning of my Mac without actually losing everything. Additionally, will I be able to use these programs if I reinstall them on a new mac? What's the easiest way to just do a clean sweep of a mac and reinstall applications that I have now - do I need the original software CD/DVDs? Other suggestions?

I read your article on the power of the Leopard X calculator but for some reason my "Convert" menu is all grey - I cannot select anything to convert!

I wonder if you can help me with a problem i am having regarding editing an excel spreadsheet, which is driving me mad: I use a Mac Powerbook that has the Microsoft Excel 2008 programme installed. My secretary has a PC upon which is stored all the work files. My Mac is networked to her computer, so I can access all the work files and edit them, print them etc. No worries.

The problem I have is this. My secretary types an excel spreadsheet with 5 columns. She can print it and all 5 columns appear on the page. I can access it and look at the page and all the 5 columns appear. However, if I go into the document and edit it, by say correcting an error, I notice that as soon as I go into the document, a dotted line appears down the right hand side of the page, between the 4th and 5th columns and then if I print it, only four columns appear on the first page and the fifth appears on its own on a separate page.
I have looked at the widths etc of the page set up and they appear the same.

Any ideas as to how I can get it to print all the text on the first page ? I am thinking it is a simple setting adjustment but for the life of me, I cannot work out what to do.

How can I change the picture on the background of my Mac? I know it's probably easy, but I have no clue.

My digital camera has a cool feature: it can take little movies. They're not as good as a real video camera, but my kids love mugging for me and the results are often quite hilarious. Like "America's Funniest Home Videos" caliber. How do I put them on my Apple iPhone so I can share them with my friends?

I thought I had turned off the "guest" account on Leopard, but was then darn surprised when a friend showed me that when he looked at the Network in our office my computer showed up. Worse, he could poke around on my file system as Guest!

I've been running Memeo LifeAgent on my computer for a few months with very good results, but recently wanted to add a specific folder to the existing network backup and was stumped. How do you add or change an existing backup schedule?

Regarding the "Stocks" dashboard widget that comes with Tiger and Leopard. I deleted the Dow Jones and NASDAQ symbols from my Widget Menu (in an attempt to reinstall and fix the thing). Is there any way to successfully reinstall this widget (Stocks) and again display the Dow Jones and NASDAQ numbers. Would also like the S&P 500. Can't find a way to do this. Since Yahoo wrote the thing, I have tried them with no success either.

I know this is a pretty niche question, but I use Apple's slick Preview application to look at images and when I open more than one at a time, it shows them all with a nice sidebar, but the sidebar elements are sorted by name, which messed me up: I want them sorted by when I actually created the graphic.

I had my old Mac laptop, an iBook, stolen and now that I have a new one, I realize that I can't get the music off my Apple iPhone which is driving me crazy! Is there some way to sync the iPod music and video portion of my cellphone without having to start from scratch again?

I have no idea what happened, but I had Microsoft Windows XP running just fine within the VMWare Fusion application, as you documented (see installing Vista in VMWare Fusion) and now it crashes without an error when I try to run it. Help! I need to get this working!

I seem to recall a long time ago that when you installed Mac OS X you also got a bunch of cool Unix command line developer tools, including a C compiler, debugging tools and much more. I'm taking a C programming class at the local community college and would like to install these tools, but have no idea where they are any more. Help?

I know you've written rather extensively about Parallels as a virtual machine environment for Mac OS X, but I'm wondering what you think of VMware Fusion and whether you know if it works properly with Microsoft Vista?

I have a Mac mighty mouse [ed note: actually, it's an "Apple Mighty Mouse"] device and am going crazy without my right-click capability. Is there some solution or something I can hack, or am I stuck having to buy something third-party?

I just got a MacBook Air and have been enjoying having the world's lightest laptop. It's an amazing piece of engineering and while it appears to have some critical features missing (like a DVD drive or Ethernet port) the fact is that I never used those features on my older MacBook Pro laptop either so it's not anything I miss.

Frankly, with my Corsair 8GB flash drive, it's just a super-modern version of "sneakernet" and was a breeze to jump onto the new device and use it full-time.

Even better, it gave me an opportunity to really pay attention to what I change on a stock Mac laptop to make it work for me. And that's what this article is about. Let's call it Dave's Guide to Critical Mac Software...

I'm running Mac OS X Leopard and the transparent menu bar is slowly but surely driving me batty. Isn't there some way to make it opaque and white again? Man, it's darn hard to read much of the time!

Today I tried to use Mail to send an e-mail to someone. Everything looked fine until I got an alert saying CANNOT SEND MESSAGE USING THE SERVER SMTP.MAC.COM. I have the option to choose another server, however, the drop-box does not have my account as one of the options. What the heck?

My sister and I share a Mac computer and I'm tired of her looking at my files. Is there some way I can protect or hide my folders without downloading any software she'd notice?

Not to sound like a complete chowderhead, but when I have a USB disk drive hooked up to my Mac and then unplug it, I always get a scary warning. How do I avoid that and eject the drive properly before unplugging it?

Every time I copy a music CD out of my collection onto my computer, it shows up with "Track 01", "Track 02", and so on. What the heck? Surely I don't need to manually enter all the track names for each of my hundreds of CDs as I rip them?

After reading about the Gizmodo bloggers wandering CES and flicking off TVs left and right, my company is paranoid someone will do a similar stunt to our displays in our Macworld exhibit booth. That'd would be a huge problem. Short of duct tape, is there some way to prevent this problem?

A friend told me that on the Mac anything that I could send to a printer could also be easily saved as a PDF file on my computer, to examine or even print later. I have no clue how to do that, but it'd sure be useful. How do you print to a PDF on a Mac?

My dashboard is displaying three copies of the weather widget. How can I delete the extra ones and just keep one?

I've been getting into trouble lately for not seeing email that my husband's sending me. I don't get a huge amount of email, but when a wave comes in, his mail does, well, get lost in the shuffle. Is there some way I can change the color of his messages in Microsoft Entourage on Mac OS X so that it stands out more?

I've been using my Mac to record simple audio snippets, pretending I'm a radio announcer, but I want to trim them down to remove my stumbles, stutters, and breathing. How can I do that?

I'm migrating from an old Mac computer to a shiny new MacBook Pro and want to be able to join my brother's network, except we don't remember the password! But my old computer can connect. Is there any way to dredge up that password from Mac OS X so I can enter it anew? I do have Leopard running on both systems...

I'm loving Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, but there's one "feature" that's driving me crazy: when I print anything, the printer application hangs around until I quit it. In the good old days (Panther) the printer would quit and vanish once the queue was empty. Is there some way to restore that behavior?

My parents are always checking up on what Web sites I visit and it's getting really old. Is there some way to have Firefox hide where I go so they can't keep tab on me?

I'm a big fan of Google's Calendar program, but am finding it annoying that I have to always have my Web browser running on my Mac to remember events. Is there some sort of notification system that will let me keep up with my Calendar events without having a page perpetually on Google Calendar?

I just upgraded my G5 mac to the latest Leopard software and am leery about syncing my iPhone with my computer because I'm afraid I'll lose data. However, I really need to get the photos off the phone and don't want to email them to myself, one by one. Your suggestion?

I have an Airport Express device and would really like to use it to enable a wireless printer on my local network. I know it can do that, but I have no idea how to hook it all up. Can you advise? I have a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and an older Apple Airport Express.

A quick question--I have an administrator in my school district that sends email from her mail program on an osx machine and often gets response from a parent that the email comes w/weird \302 \302 \302 in it. Do you know waz up w/that?

All of a sudden I have an American flag on my Mac menu bar, along with what looks like some sort of tangram puzzle. In fact, when I look at different Macintosh, I find that people have lots of different tiny icons on their menu bar. What the heck are they and how do I trim them down?

Someone switched my default settings so that all my jpegs have graphic converter icons and automatically open in graphic converter. I'd like to switch back to the old photoshop or preview icons, and can't figure out how to do that. I was also worried that if I send these images to a client it might not open for them. Is that true? And how do I switch back?

I don't know what the story is, but sometimes I go to places and my Mac automatically connects to the wireless network, but other times it requires that I select the network. The password to the network is in my "keychain", but something's still missing... ?

Hi Dave. I run a network of Mac computers at a high school in Oregon and find that the kids often leave their computers running after class. This means the next time someone goes to use the computer they're in the wrong account. Lots of lost files! Any way to remedy this?

Given the choice, I'd much rather watch DVDs on my Mac with the great free app VLC rather than the lame "DVD Player" that is included with Mac OS X. How the heck do I do that?

I'm a huge fan of Apple's iChat program and use it all the time with my friends. A couple of my friends also have cool tweaks where they have amusing status messages and one even shows what she's listening to on her computer. How do they do that?

My kids are constantly harassing me about being able to chat with them via instant message, via "AIM". What's AIM and how do I get started?

About 6 months ago I was playing around on my iBook G4 and I found the option to change the format that Apple+Shift+4 saves in. For some odd reason I choose JPG-2000 (picture.jp2). Of course, now I can't find how to change it back!

I want to take a picture (capture) of my screen while running certain programs on my Mac so I can email the screenshot to a friend but have no idea how to do so. Is it even possible?

I have a ton of mp3 format audio files on my Mac OS X system and want to chop a short segment out of it to use as a custom ringtone for my Apple iPhone. What's the solution?

I keep getting errors about not being able to establish a secure connection with my mail server in Entourage because of a bad root certificate. My ISP has sent me the necessary "trusted root certificate" file, but I have no idea how to install it. Help!

Dave, I saw your earlier article about how to convert a DVD for your iPhone, but that was written for Windows XP users [see How to put your DVDs onto your iPhone]. Do you have a similar article about how to convert DVDs on a Mac OS X system? I don't have a PC around...

It's the worst thing I can imagine happening!! I took a trip to Brazil with a group of friends and took my new Canon camera with me. I got home and hooked it up to my Mac to show my parents, except my young daughter somehow monkeyed with it and deleted all the pictures!!!! Is there any way to recover deleted pictures from the flash card (compact flash, if it matters) of my Canon digital camera?

I use Microsoft Word on my Mac every day, and every time I create a new document I change the default typeface from Times 12 point to Papyrus 13 point. Surely there's some way to change the default typeface in a new document and save me this hassle?

Hopefully you can help me. i was in a divorce and the name of my laptop is x y's computer. I have a white apple laptop running os x. unfortunately, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to change it so i won't be reminded that i was married everytime i go to log into my computer or when i poke around my computer... thanks for your help

Kind of a strange query, but I run Parallels extensively and often find that I need to email data files I've created therein -- within Windows XP -- to my colleagues. I don't want to have any mail program running in WinXP, however, I want to just use Apple Mail. Is there an EASY way to do this?

My computer will not play dvd and I dont know if said computer has a dvd player or not.

I have a macbook pro. Recently I installed parallels desktop on it. But the problem i have is when I connect a usb device to my macbook it is not being detected in the windows parallel desktop. Also I have no idea how to get right click options in the parallel windows desktop. Can you please help me. Thank you for your help in advance.

When traveling from home base & I am in a "wirless zone", like the Santa Fe airport, where access is free or visiting a residence that has a wireless system, I am always able to access the wireless to receive messages or use the internet, yet I am UNABLE TO SEND emails. I have talked to Apple & our web host, Crystaltech - but to no avail. Apple says that Crystaltech should support that function and Crystaltech has indicated that the only way I can SEND is to go to their internet site and use the mail system. However, my husband's IBM Think Pad allows him to send by changing the outgoing server designation. I am truly computer "dumb" and can only presume that there is something so simple for me to do to accomplish the SEND task, when away from home.

I have an iPhone and appreciate all its features but one: I can't use the calendar capability because I use Google Calendar, not iCal on my Mac. Is there some way that I can either manually or automatically synchronize Google Calendar with iCal?

Just got a new Apple iPhone and bought a movie from the Apple iTunes Store so I can watch it on the phone, but it fails with "computer is not authorized to watch this movie", even though I bought it and originally downloaded it on my Mac. What the heck? How do I authorize my computer?

I'm stumped. With my iPod I simply drag and drop the music I want to take with me from my library onto the iPod on the left side of iTunes, but my Apple iPhone doesn't allow me to do that. How the heck do I put songs on the iPhone without synchronizing my entire (massive) music library?

Okay, this is driving me crazy! I applied an update a few days ago to my Mac OS X system (version 10.4.10), I think it was for a SuperDrive driver on my MacBook Pro, and it came up with an error message indicating it wasn't necessary for my system. No problem, but now I get that error each time I boot my computer!

Hey Dave - I recently got an iMac. And have signed up on the Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM). How can I delete someone on my list?

I don't know what's going on, but every so often I get an email message in Microsoft Entourage that doesn't have any message body, even though the person who sent it insists that they included a message. Is there some overzealous spam filter in the way, or a virus, or what?

Like you, I am highly impressed with the Creative Labs Zen Vision:W [see