Three Mac tips I uncovered this weekend
I upgraded to Leopard this weekend on my work machine, a MacBook Pro. It was a seamless upgrade. I had already upgraded my home machine, a Mac Pro, several weeks ago and that went fine too. I have been enjoying some of the new features in Leopard, mostly spaces, quickview, and stacks. Time Machine is really slick too, but I am just figuring out how it works alongside SuperDuper, my backup program of choice. Over the course of this weekend, I found three things that helped me out.
Upgrade trick for 10.5.1 (if you hit the snag I did)
I installed the latest 10.5.1 upgrade on my Mac Pro and ran into a scary problem (I did not run into this on my MBP.) As it was rebooting after the install, it got into an endless cycle of asking me to register. I could not get out of that cycle even after repeated hard restarts. Thank goodness I could use my MBP to search the internet for an answer, which turned out to be:
1. Force reboot the machine by holding down the shift key during power up.
2. When you get to the “safe mode” screen, click the back button to cancel login.
3. Click the soft reboot option. When my machine rebooted, the updates finished installing and I was in business again.
Parallels and Leopard
After my Leopard upgrade, I fired up Parallels (I run XP Pro.) I immediately got an error message that said my OS was too old for the existing version of MacFUSE. Turns out, all you need to do is go here and grab the 10.5-1.3.1 version of MacFuse, install it, and you are good to go.
iStat menus
I got a tip from a colleage at work about a really nifty Mac system monitoring tool called “iStat pro.” It is a dashboard widget and while that is handy, I started using another tool from the same company called “iStat menus” and I am finding that even nicer. I am not a huge Dashboard widget user — to be honest, I often forget to use them. But, putting the monitoring info right in plain sight on my menu bar is really useful. Plus, if you show the date and time in the menu bar, you have a nice drop down of a calendar, something I know I will use a lot. Both products are from a company called iSlayer and are free (donations voluntary.)
