Learn more about your Mac OSX machine!

The Finder is the backbone of every Mac. The Finder is the icons on the screen, the windows, the trash... Its all the Finder. For 30 years the Finder has been there in every Mac. From the Mac classic to the intel Macs that are coming out now... Not everyone though knows the extent of the Finder, a lot of people think it is just an icon on the dock.

The Finder was originally a program that ran the icons on the desktop and windows etc, the classic navigation... If you quit the Finder all the icons and Finder windows disappear. So try quitting the Finder and seeing what happens... It's not easy to quit the Finder, but it is possible on OSX macs with script editor. Just search "script editor" on spotlight and go into it. Now copy and paste the following code into the script editor window and click run: tell the application "Finder" to quit

Now all the icons and Finder windows that you have open should disappear, and the arrow/light under the Finder icon on the dock should disappear... Now try to use your Mac without the Finder open. For a start you'll have to find all applications with spotlight, you won't be able to open folders. You'll find it very hard! And without the spotlight on early versions of OSX or OS9, OS8 etc it will be impossible. On OS9 you have no dock or spotlight, so the Finder is vital!

Now try to use your Mac normally without the Finder... Now do you realize how important the Finder is? You can't even open your trash! Go on, click on your trash, you can't open it!

The Finder - Core of every Mac

With a lot of people running out of battery, saving battery life is a problem. And if your doing something like surfing the web or doing something where you'd give up performance for battery life you waste a lot of power. In the article I will give you tips on how to save the battery life of your Mac Book Pro, Mac Book or Mac Book Air.

Firstly, if your on Leopard or Snow Leopard click on the battery icon on the menu bar and select "Better battery life". This gives up performance for battery life. If you don't have full admin control over your Mac then this may not work...

Another way is to dim the screen by hitting the sun button on your keyboard. Turn the brightness down so much the screen goes black then turn it up one so the screen is visible but dim. If you have control to the system preferences then go to "displays" and tune down the graphics. Make it thousands of colours, if you do 256 colours the display will look terrible. If your playing a game go into the game's settings and tune down the graphics/detail.

A more advanced way that works if most of your screen is white, like if you are reading/writing a document is to turn the screen black and white. You can do this by hitting control, option, apple and 8 at the same time. Click them again to change it back.

Lastly, if your playing a high graphical game you will use more battery power than if your reading a text document or a PDF. Oh, and if your not using a CD or DVD that's in your drive take it out as it will waste power having it in.

It's great on Mac OSX how you can get free updates from Apple automatically. Its so easy, simple, handy and useful. If an update for Safari comes out you'll know about it! But you should know which updates you really should download and which updates which you don't need that just waste your internet bandwidth.

One of the most important that everyone should download are security updates, your Mac can never be too secure! But you don't need updates you don't use, for example if you had three new updates in your software update window:

iTunes update
Intel Security update
Safari 4 update

Lets say you are a huge fan or iTunes and always use it, so you'd get the iTunes update. You'd of course get the security update because you can never have a mac too secure! But you use Firefox and never Safari, so downloading the Safari update would be a waste... So you'd download the top two but not the Safari one.

But what if the Safari 4 update keeps popping up all the time and reminding you that you don't have it. Most people would just update it to get rid of the reminders. But there is a better way! Just select the update that you don't want, go to the Update menu, and select ignore update. There, it won't keep annoying you!

Has your iMac ever played up running CDs or DVDs? This has happened to me and it turns out the problem can be solved in ten seconds (seriously). The CD/DVD in your mac has to rest on the back of your iMac, so if your iMac is leaning forward then the CD/DVD will fall forward and scrape against the front of the iMac. If you don't get what I'm saying, thats ok, you don't need to understand! To fix it tilt your iMac back on it's stand a fair bit (not too much, but tilt it quite a bit back). This worked with my iMac, so I hope it works with you if you have that problem!

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