CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

I recently found a weird file in my trash that looked like this:

weird file in trash

It is impossible to delete the file or rename it. secure emptying the trash won’t solve the problem either. if I click on “get info” it disappears. I found the following thread, which provides a good solution to the problem. And don’t worry it is not a virus

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5882792#5882792

I run a Airport Extreme basestation with a western digital My Book 500GB USB harddrive attached to it and since 10.5.2 it has been possible to do wireless backup, with a few draw backs. I had to mount the drive manually each time I wanted to perform a back and the back ups took considerably longer than they used to over fire wire but it was working. After I upgraded to 10.5.3 Time Machine kept on telling me

The drive could not be mounted

even though it was already mounted and Time Machine could access it for back ups. I read up on the problem and found some fairly complicated solutions but in fact it is really easy to solve the problem:

Simply go to system preferences and Time Machine and choose select drive and reselect your Airdisk. Not only that Time Machine will continue your old back up but it now also mounts the drive all by it self which which completly automates the Backup process.

I now enjoy Time Capsule like backup without having had to spend a the extra money.

 I got my mac with Tiger and was amazed how well the networking worked in comparison to windows. Once I upgraded to leopard I wasn’t all that happy anymore. So here I want to address the bugs I came across and how I partially solved them.

Wifi problems:

At my parents house a have a simple WEP encrypted Wifi which used to work great, but Leopard simply can’t connect properly since it wants to force WPA security settings although its WEP. Nothing would solve the problem unless I ran the diagnose assistant. There it was recognized as WEP and I could get a connection. The big drawback is that I had to repeat this step every time my Notebook wakes up from standby. In addition Leopard does not remember the WiFi. It is listet in the Know Networks but I have to go through all these steps again and again.

Windows shares / SMB shares

At the very beging I noticed that my windows shared computers would not show up in the sidebar as they should. One thing you can do if your shared computer does not show up is to connect manually using this command:

smb://yourcomputersnameorIP

This will mount the lost share and you can access it.

 When I first heard about bootcamp I thought why would I ever want windows on my mac if Mac OS X is so much better but after I found out that the Mac Version of C&3 is not avaliable in Austria there was no other way than infesting my mac book pro with the evil. I thought it would be really easy, like Steve said, and followed the steps in the bootcamp assistant. I encountered pretty much every problem you can possibly have when installing bootcamp so here is what I did to finally make it work. 

•  Start the bootcamp Assistant. When prompted to create A partition you could get this Error ( german only): 

Ihre Festplatte kann nicht partitioniert werden, weil einige Daten nicht verschoben werden können.Legen Sie eine Sicherung der Festplatte an und formatieren Sie sie mit dem Festplatten-Dienstprogramm als Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Einzelvolume. Stellen Sie anschließend die Informationen von der Sicherung wieder her und starten Sie den Boot Camp Assistenten erneut.

•  In order to solve this Problem you have to boot the Mac from your OS Disc and start the Disc Utility. Select Repair Volume and wait till its done. After completion restart your Mac and you should be good to go. Launch the Bootcamp Assistant again and follow the procedure, it should work now. 
• Your next step depends on the Windows XP SP2 CD you have. There are some that are capable of Formatting a predefined partition(BOOTCAMP) and some that can’t. I had and Educational License from my University, which was not able to perform the task. So the Setup crashed on my serveral times till I figured this out. In order for Bootcamp to work you somehow need to reformat the partition named Bootcamp which has been created by the Assistant.
• go to www.freedos.org, download the full CD ISO, burn the Image to a CD using the Disk Utility. Boot the Mac from that CD by restarting and holding down the "C" key. Then select option 5 to run freedos from the cd.

format the partion by typing "format c:" into the dos console

•  Now you are already on the save side. Restart the Mac and run Bootcamp again, install Windwos and you should be fine.

When putting together this post I found a really good German HowTo on this problem. 

just a few more minutes till the Macworld 2008 kicks off. I am really excited this year since its my first Macworld with actually owning a mac. What do I wish for? I would like to see a G3 iphone since it would be a device that comes pretty close to my imaginary perfect all in one gadget. I also wished that the Itunes Movies would be open for European Users as well. So much Video content is restricted to US only, which is bad when living in Austria. Most importantly I would like to see a new update to fix the Networking bugs for Leopard. Allright enough of the speculation, its 9:00 AM in california and 6:00 pm in Austria time to get to the coverage… I changed my mind and will wait till the video stream is online at apple.com 

I bought my first mac (Macbook Pro) only a month before Leopard was released. At first I was amazed how well tiger 10.4 performed. I then upgraded to Leopard in the first few days after the launch and was really disappointed. Once the computer ran for about an hour the dock became laggy and unsmooth, window effects were just as bad. I found the reason for this to be the 3d glass effekt of the dock. One can solve this problem by deactivating this greatly advertised feature of leopard by typing the following lines of code into the console.
Solution:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

After this very simple step, I found my new OS to run as smooth as expected.