Mac & MacOS Help

I have a Snow iMac G3 800MHz, with both OS9.2.2 and OS10.1.5 on it, and for jollies, I put 10.3 on my external firewire hard drive, and just boot off the external drive. I wanted to see how well that works, and it works wonderfully. (it is up to 10.3.7 right now)

Anyway, this is my question: I’ve been itching to buy an external firewire DVD drive, to play movies or anything else a DVD drive can be used for. I’ve tried to figure out if this is possible, and whether I would run into problems concerning encoding or decoding movies, software vs hardware decoding, which external DVD drives have the decoding ability built in, and… I’m not sure what else to think.

So I was wondering what your thoughts are and how to tell if external DVD drives have hardware decoding built into them, or if I could just buy any ol’ external DVD drive as long as I had the proper software.

View Answer »

Dave, I’m taking my iBook into the shop for some repairs and really want to do a backup beforehand, just in case. Problem is, I don’t have an Apple SuperDrive on my Mac OS X iBook. What’s the best strategy?

View Answer »

I have an iTunes/iPod problem. In August I created a library on one of my
computers with about 150 songs. I then created another library on a different
computer. I now want to put my old songs from the first library back into my
iPod. So, today I opened my first library and hooked up my iPod. For all the
songs I clicked (most) I got a message that said “This song could not be used
because the original file could not be located. Would you like to locate it? ”
I was so confused. Have I lost all of my songs? The library hasn’t been opened
in a while but is that a reason to mess up all the songs? Please help me!! I
want to listen to these songs.

View Answer »

Dave, I’m confused. I’m trying to make a music CD with my Mac, but when I just transfer the songs from iTunes onto a disk they don’t work in my car or regular cd player. Someone told me that I need to convert them in order for it to work. They gave me the site musicmatch.com but it is for PC and I’m on a Mac.

View Answer »

I keep hearing that if any of my programs start to act oddly within Mac OS X that one culprit can be the preferences file for that particular program. That’s all well and good, but what if the corrupted preferences file is messing up things I can’t see? Surely there’s some way to check or verify the preference files to ensure all is well?

View Answer »

Dave, Thanks for your great tip about clearing Microsoft Entourage message archives of attachments on my Mac OS X system [see A Useful Tip for Microsoft Entourage on The Intuitive Life]. Now can you help me delete all the unwanted email addresses that secretly pop up when I fill out the TO: field. The ones that exist from prior email, spam, etc?

View Answer »

Dave, I remember in MacOS 9 that it was pretty easy to disable guest access to your Macintosh, but in Mac OS X I can’t find any clue how to change this so that while I offer file sharing off my server, it’s only for people with actual accounts. Can you shed some light on this?

View Answer »