Good Points for Choosing Mac OS X

Mac OS X is more robust, efficient and multitasking in nature as compare to other platforms like Windows and Linux. Rolling up nature in OS X versions (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite) has brought up Mac with new enriched apps to deliver the best performance. These apps made the working with Mac platform very easy along with the superb quick results. Few apps are paid and while others are available as free.

1. Skype Group Calling Free on Mac

We all know about Skype and one of its features is ‘Group Calling’. Earlier, it was available with paid premium plan for Mac users; but now Skype has unleashed the curb and made the Group Calling feature free for OS X Snow Leopard or later version users. Even iPhone users can participate in-group chats. ‘Group Screen Sharing’ feature on Mac is also possible now.

To enjoy the benefits, one has to sign up for creating a free account to link into the Skype. If Mac user has Microsoft account then no worry. Simply that Mail ID can be used in Mac OS X to get into Skype account. Voice messages can be left in Skype through Mac OS X, but voice messaging must be left as activated.

Reliable Drive Defrag Software Solved My Problem

Have you ever noticed that how your Mac is dipping it’s performance? If you have noticed that and worried then you must have started searching over the internet to find out the causes o slow Mac and surprised to see the various reasons. The main cause for this odd behavior of slow Mac is fragmentation.

What is Fragment?

Fragments are generated on Mac hard drive over a period of time due to the continuous deletion and saving process. Deletion of a file creates blank space between used memory locations. When a new file, of large size, is saved to this single blank chunk then it is broken into parts and gets saved in different locations of the memory. These small parts of single file are called fragments.

Thus saving a new file to multiple fragments and accessing an old file managed via fragments, both takes more than the usual time. For accessing any particular file or application, the operating system needs to find and collect multiple parts of the file from various positions. Similarly, If OS X gets a new file in this situation to save then OS X initially creates parts of file then find out various fragments to save. After this, it maintains links between all the parts of a parted file. 

How to Backup Mac Drive?

Maintaining data backup is always advised by experts to stay away from the worst situations like data loss or drive corrupt/failure. In case, if important file, photos or video gets lost then it can be recovered easily from the backup created earlier. Although, booting into safe mode, shutting down Mac machine properly, repairing file permissions and some other precautions keep a Mac machine in good condition. But few problems like file corruption or even complete volume corruption or volume inaccessibility force a user to make a successful offsite backup in advance. On the other hand, if you are a Mac user then surely you would be aware about ‘Time Machine’ and how to take and maintain data backup via Time Machine.  If you are not well versed with these concepts then please scroll down to learn about the steps of cloning Mac drive and how to take regular/incremental data backup.

What is Time Machine?

Time Machine is a built-in utility in Mac OS X for creating and maintaining data backup safely. It maintains a system to keep backup files in an organized order and remembers the Mac system-status for a particular time period in its memory in order to show, how the system looked on a particular day. This utility was introduced first time with the launching of Mac OS X Leopard version.

How to Set up & Use Time Machine in Mac?

It’s a well-known saying that Time Machine is expert at taking backup automatically; but user has to set it up successfully in advance. Every Mac user is well-informed about Time Machine and must use this built-in utility for creating and laying data backup gently, if OS X 10.5 or above version is running in Mac machine. Many of us are well grounded about Time Machine app but not well-versed with its pretty features. Let’s see, how to set up Time Machine and How to recover the lost data from the Time Machine backup.

How to Set up Time Machine in Mac?

If Mac machine is running OS X 10.5 or above version then user can take benefit from this app. To locate and setup Time Machine, firstly an external drive is needed to store necessary backup. Suppose your current boot drive has only 2 partitions and you choose one of those for Time Machine backup then it won’t be so fruitful. Because if your drive gets crash or fail then probability of original data loss and backup-loss would be increased due to the same physical location of drive. It is recommended to use external drive as backup storage and should be of size nearby 2 TB or 3TB (as required). In case, if you choose an external drive (formatted & partitioned) then it should be connected prior with Mac system and mounted on the desktop before you undertake the Time Machine. Above all, if you are attempting this process first time then please backup entire drive or have a Mac drive clone.

Time Machine

 How to Select Backup Drive?

How to Speed up Slow OS X Yosemite? (Part-II)

If using the steps does not see any noticeable improvement in Mac speed, mentioned in How to Speed up Slow Mac OS X Yosemite? (Part-I) then here are few more tricks to speed up Mac machine. 

Open a new Finder window either by clicking ‘Finder’ icon from Dock or select File > New Window. Select your start up drive (generally called “Macintosh HD”) in the sidebar under ‘Devices’ section and press Command-i to explore information. Expand the ‘General’ section from the top of the ‘information window’ and check the “Available” and “Capacity” readings for Mac boot drive. If you only have a few GB of space available, then get ready for removing some items from your system. Digital photos, music and movies tend to be the main reason for low drive space, but there are many causes for this. Usually, 10% of drive space is recommended to kept as free, as this will help OS X to manage RAM properly and run at optimal speed.

accessing Mac startup drive

 

Re-Organize Spotlight’s index

If any major changes to the applications or data are done on Mac HDD then OS X may spend few times in indexing the changes. So those items can be found out via Spotlight. Mostly, few processes like “mds” and “mdworker” take a large amount of CPU percentage cause the system to slow, and increase energy usage. This should only take a short time to complete, but at times can get stuck and continually slows down the system.