Preparations to be done before installing latest version of Mac OS X

After the release of the Apple's next version of Mac OS X ie; Mountain Lion, Mac users are eager to install it because it is considerably more better, fast and efficient than Mac Lion. But, before installing it, one should prepare his Mac completely ready for it which will let your upgradation smooth as well.

However, operating system upgrades and especially when it comes to Mac aren't so simple, So, having some knowledge about the tasks can save you from frustration later. 

First, Check the compatibility of your Mac with Mountain Lion:
Before you think about getting all those great new features of Mac Mountain Lion, you need to check whether your system meets minimal requirements for it or not. If your Mac is qualified for lion then it doesn't mean that it will certainly qualify for Mountain lion too.
The general system requirements :

• OS X v10.6.8 or later
• 2GB of memory
• 8GB of available free space
  

Some new features, such as AirPlay Mirroring, require newer machines sold in the last year.
To check out your Mac qualification for Mountain lion, click on Apple tab in your menubar, then select "About this Mac" and then hit the "More Info" button. About this Mac window will show your model details including release date, amount of memory installed to compare with the basic requirements. You can find also the available free space by clicking on Storage tab.

2.Clean up and optimize your Mac hard drive:
Although it requires 8gb of free space so to achieve this requirement one needs to clean up Mac drive as its been better for optimization of your Mac. By deleting all useless apps, temporary files,cache,log files you can make easily free space. You can do this by some third party software ,as it is really being a big requirement today to have such utility which keep your Mac fast.


Repair and verify disk permissions using disk utility: OS X Disk Utility can ensure you about your disk status. It maintained your hard drive properly when you regular checking your Disk maintenance utilities. It assure you that your hard drive is error-free.
Select -­- Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility to verify and repair disk permissions and the disk itself.


Backup your Mac before any upgradation:
You must take first backup of your Mac before going through any upgradation process. Even before doing partitions in your Mac drive before installation you must make clone of Mac drive or an image of entire Mac drive

How to make OS X Mountain Lion Installation Boot DVD

After understanding the need of Installation boot dvd for OS X 10.8 Mountain lion one needs to know the steps to create it. Although Mac OS X 10.8 mountain lion is offered to you through the Application Store of Apple, like OS X Lion was provided the same way. But in some cases it is suggested by professionals to make mountain lion installation boot disk. So for that particular groups of people who prefer to create bootable installation drive I am going to explain steps to create it.

If you are also included in the same group just go through these simple steps to get upgrade to Mac Mountain lion in easy and efficient way. Thankfully it is still possible to create a bootable installer for Mountain lion from any USB drive or external hard drive.

Note:While creating a bootable install drive don’t forget to check OS X 10.8 System requirements for the destination Mac before beginning.

If you already have the Mac OS X 10.8 install DMG extracted, skip this first set of steps and jump directly to further step of making the bootable drive below.

Download OS X 10.8 and Extract DMG File:

1. Download Mountain Lion from the Application Store.
2. Go to Applications -> Directory-> right click on “Install Mac OS X Mountain Lion.application” and selecting “Show Package Contents”.
3. Open the “Contents” directory and then click to open “Shared Support”, where looking for a file named as “InstallESD.dmg”
4. Double-click on this file InstallESD.dmg to mount it on the desktop.

Create the OS X Mountain Lion Install Boot Drive

1. Launch Disk utility and connect a USB drive to your Mac
2. Select the USB drive from the list shown in left hand side bar of disk utility and then click on “Erase” tab shown above, and choose “Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)” as the format(i.e HFS+ known as Mac file format ), then click on the “Erase” tab in the bottom corner.
3. Now in order to restore usb drive, select the formatted USB drive from the left hand sidebar and click on the “Restore” tab.
4. Drag the previously mounted “Mac OS X Install ESD” image into the “Source” section
5. Finally Drag formatted partition to the “Destination” section, then click- “Restore”
6. Confirm that the USB drive will lose it’s data and enter the Admin password when asked.
   
   

Now, Disk Utility can create a bootable OS X Mountain Lion installer drive out of USB drive using the disk image. This would take a little time while depending on how fast the drive and Mac are but 20 minutes isn’t unusual.

When it finished, reboot your Mac and hold down the Option key to bring up the boot menu.

It will show you all available OS in your mac and recovery HD of lion, here select the “Mac OS X” option, and now it will let your Mac boot into the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installer, from here installation is same as normal. Click on Continue, select the destination drive, and install.

Note: It is important to create clone of your drive and also create clone of Mac mountain lion Recovery HD.

How do I defrag my Mac Hard Drive | Defrag Mac OS X

How do I defrag my mac? Is it really needed to defrag Mac hard drive ? Such questions come to mind especially to new Mac bie who recently switch from windows to Mac.

 You don't need to defrag it, ever. It does it automatically."
"But even it's running really slow..."
"Repair permissions or something. Defragging is not necessary actually on a mac."
" it's not required, Mac’s do it themselves, blah blah blah"

These are some common replies we get while searching for optimizing tools in Mac or usually you read in comments, they ask about how do they defrag Mac.

The truth is, there is need to defragmenting Mac to boost Mac performance or to optimize it.
 
It has two massive flaws which I feel people must need to be made aware of:-

HFS+ file system of Mac OS X lion has inbuilt feature of doing defragging of files automatically but upto a very small size of 20mb only.

So, If you're a working in MNC’s, a photographer, movie producer, a songwriter or anything which involves working with many large files, then you are required to use some third party defragmentation tool to take care of such fragmented files.

Why is space fragmentation a big problem?
The small sized memory cannot be used to store a large file even if they accumulated total size is larger than required one. Suppose the small free spaces(gaps) created, are combined together by defragmentation to form large blocks of free space available in a part of the drive, then an entire file can be stored/written to it.

So, the only option is to buy a Mac drive defragmenting software like Stellar Drive Defrag. I know this is made you pay once some (39)dollars,but believe me, this is something you really need to do soon in your Mac.

I Love my Mac and I never want to see it sluggish. After experiencing a series of software as I am very old user of Mac, I found Stellar Drive Defrag easy to use apps. I have been using it since many years and it has done a fantastic job.

It has a number of other features as well, For more details about this tools you may refer the below link:  http://www.stellardefragdrive.com

More About Recovery HD in Mountain lion

Although there are many excellent features of Montain Lion, but I liked 'Recovery mode' the most and hope you will never need to use. First we should know what exactly Recovery HD is and then its uses.

Recovery HD is basically a partition which comes into play when you install either Mac Lion or Mounain Lion on your Mac. The installer of Mountain Lion creates an invisible, 650MB partition. This bootable partition is the portion of the drive which is treated as seperate volume by operating system.

Basically, recovery HD resides in startup disk. And the concept behind recovery mode is if you ever face any problem with your Mac startup disk, then you can boot your Machine using this Recovery HD.

So, generally, recovery HD includes fixing problems, restoring files and to perform some basic troubleshooting operations.

Conditions of getting Recovery HD partition during installation:

I have read many questions in comments regarding Recovery HD. Recently I found one in which user asked that; “Does recovery HD partition created in all cases at the time of installation, as some users didn't find this partition after installation, why is it so.

So, that is what I have explained below.

In our research, it is found that this special partition(Recovery mode)appears only when your internal drive formatted with GUID partition scheme and Mac OS Extended format, and its size must be of 13GB.

 

In additin that drive must having only single partition, can be partitioned in Boot camp Assistant but in case of multi-partition only.

Use of recovery mode:

You can use Recovery mode for booting your Mac during any problem including crash of your Mac. So here we don't require any OS X installation DVD or separate bootable hard drive for fixing or resolving such problems.

You can boot from this whatever be the reason/ issue by holding key R while restarting your Mac. It shows you the list of all available OS in your Mac including Recovery HD (Lion /Mountain lion). So by making double click to it you can boot through this mode.

Recovery HD is the utility by which you can also fix some problems. Now, as I explained above you can boot even in case of OS crash. It remains on drive even it has been erased. This is because it is invisible (even in Disk utility) and also read only.

So, you might be thinking of keeping your favourite third party tool onto it in order to make it available always in recovery mode. Unfortunately it can't be possible as it is invisible , So you can't have access to it-­-­- recovery mode is inaccessable.

But we can make recovery HD accessable only during startup or booting your Mac in two ways that we will discuss further. So this point we will covering in our new article.

Alternate of recovery HD in Mountain Lion

Recovery HD can't help us in every case or issue because we know that Recovery HD partition is actually the part of your Mac’s internal hard drive or SSD, if that drive gets some physical problem, the recovery partition itself is inaccessible. In other words, you will require something that can save you from every problem. So, its nice idea to use some suitable software as a substitute for it. I will personaly suggest you to go for Stellar Drive Clone for taking backup and also have amazing feature of making clone of recovery HD automatically in order to make your Mac more secure from any data disaster. Your recovery HD during installation resides automatically in startup list.

I want to add one important feature of this software to give support to SSD, Ex-Fat, NTFS+ file system in its latest version 2.5.

6 Easy Things to Speed up your Mac Mountain Lion

OS X Mountain Lion is the latest version of Mac operating system, released by Apple in last week of July 2012. Its been an update done in OS X 10.7 (Mac OS X Lion). So, there should be no doubt that it has better performance (speed), more features than Lion but still users can face slow speed in Mountain Lion, which can be enhanced by using some tricks and methods.

So, here I am going to give you some very beneficial tips which you all should go through and also implement to quick fix a slow Mountain Lion in few minutes then check out my article.

1.Upgradation of Drive (Replace your hard drive with SSD):

SSD are relatively high performance disk compared to other drives that spin either at speed of 5,400 to 7,200 RPM. Although its quite expensive but its a lot faster(18mbps for SCSI-II and 35mbps for Ultrawide SCSI interface.) because it contain its own CPU and no moving parts. Means unlike traditional drives it doesn't have any moving platters and headers which make it less effective to crash.

NOTE: At the time of upgrading from old drive to new one(SSD), don't forget to take backup of your data. And after transferring your data to SSD there are some great software which support SSD and can image and clone Mac hard drive. One such efficient tool is like Stellar Drive Clone (I am personally using its new version 2.5 that give support to my SSD and windows file formats on my Mac disk).

2.Squeeze the Dock:

The Dock is a kind of visual eye candy on Mac, but it take up system resources when you’ve enabled various animations on it . To turn off these animations follow these steps:

a) Open System Preferences and go for 'Dock'
b) Select Scale effect under Minimize windows using setting
c) Uncheck the box of Animate opening applications

There are several others eye candy settings in Mountain Lion that you can disable to speed things up.

3.Install additional memory to your system:

This is most effective (and cheapest) way to improve performance in general for any computer or in Mac Mountain lion it will also works. And you can observe the way your Mac speed is improved by installing additional memory in your system. The reason of increase in RAM is required if one have need to open several apps at a time. As RAM memory is is consumed at every attempt of opening any application. Mountain Lion officially only requires 2 GB of memory to run, but in real-world usage it’s not really enough.

4.Disable startup Items/Login items:

Startup items are those which automatically opens at the time of booting so called startup or login items. Generally users add frequently used application in their startup list so that they need not to open them again and again, as it opens automatically when you login to your Mac. But when such list is increased it causes your Mac slow as all apps add in the startup list tend to open together at booting.

To look what’s set to launch when you login, go to Users & Groups in System Preferences, select user account from left panel, and then choose the 'Login Items' tab in the main window. Here you can add and remove any items you want, So it’s best and suggested to keep the list as small as possible.

5.Remove Unnecessary Dashboards Widgets:

Widgets are small application that you can access in your Mac by pressing the F4 key on your keyboard. There are many useful widgets, but every single one consume some memory and keep CPU resources busy although for a while. So, it’s good not to have number of widgets running, so close down the one or any that you don’t use or remove any you don't need.

6.Turn off Animation of Desktop:

By disabling desktop picture animations you can always have same desktop background. While for many of us it’s rather boring as they feel nice in changing the desktop background every once in a while, it does use less processing power and should speed up your Mac just a fraction.

To get the best out of your Mac its necessary to keep it clean and fast with some third party tool. In my opinion, Stellar Speed up Mac as one of the best Mac optimization software.

Fix iMessage problem in Mountain Lion 10.8.1 release | Fix iMessage issue

How can I fix imessage problem which doesn't recognize my apple id ? Fixing problem in imessage in Mountain Lion. I can't login with my standard AppleID or my secondary ID that I use with iCloud. These are the questions being asked by Mountain Lion users since its release. The Apple has fixed the iMessage issues in Mac OS X 10.8.1.

The first Mountain Lion update has fixed issues related to following stability and compatibility issues.

 

The problem of launching safari while using PAC file is also fixed which otherwise caused the system to be unresponsive when using Pinyin input.

New in Gatekeeper :

In updated version of OS X 10.8, Gatekeeper still maintains the security and is intended to increase security. It makes it difficult to mistakenly install software that could contain malware. Application for the company's App Store or from certified third-party developers are easier to install than others, for which the user has to manually override Gatekeeper's protections.

The basic requirements of the OS are :

Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3 or i5 or Xeon chipset, 2 GB of RAM and either OS X Lion or Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

Need for Bootable installation disc in Lion/Mountain lion

Previous versions of Mac OS X10.7 were available in bootable installation disc but from lion onwards no bootable disc were provided by Apple. Now the Mac OS X are available at Mac App store only.

This lack in physical media perhaps becomes complaint about Mountain lion's App store distribution as there are many reasons and situations where we realize the need of bootable installation DVD.

So you must know that there might be several reasons to create bootable installer for Lion and Mountain lion. Here are some of them:

1. In case you want to install OS X 10.8 in multiple Macs, bootable disc can be more convenient and effortless than downloading or copying the entire Mountain Lion installer to each system.
2. If you leave installer in its default location or under application folder, installer get automatically deleted after downloading from Mac App store. So,whether you want to install OS X10.8 in other Macs or to create bootable dvd installer,in both of them be sure to move it out from Application folder or to copy it on another folder before installallation.
3. Lion has Recovery HD that is used for booting your system if you face any problem at Mac startup. This feature is not in all Mac but only in Lion and later versions.But if your Mac is facing any trouble, recovery mode is not available due to its read only access. So if you need to reinstall Montain lion recovery mode allow you to download 4GB+ installer again. But, using bootable disc make it easier to do so. So Recovery HD of OS is not sufficient to save you from all problems.

NOTE:Before all these operations it is suggested by professionals to create a backup of your drive. To have reliable,regularly updated backup solution for recovery HD we may search for some third party software for Creating bootable disk (that can clone recovery HD automatically) to be in safer side always. By making bootable clone of recovery HD which allows you to boot your system.

After understanding the requirement of bootable dvd there is need to know the process of creating bootable disc. In my next blog I will let you know step wise detailed process of creating bootable drive for Mac mountain lion.