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Archive for » October, 2009 «

Tech Toolbox: Onyx

Friday, October 30th, 2009 | Author: OWC Duane

onyxIconEvery now and then, you may find that your startup seems slower than normal or that some things are just not working the way they used to. When that happens, it is usually best to be proactive, rather than putting it off until the problem potentially gets worse. There are numerous things that can cause problems with your Mac, both hardware and software. When working with computers, it pays to not only have a physical toolkit, but also some good software tools to help with various situations. Having the right options at your disposal can help save time, which most people do not seem to have enough of.

One great little maintenance utility you can use is Onyx. Onyx takes several important maintenance tasks and puts them all in to one easy to use package. Even better, though, this software is free! Article Continues…

Category: Tech Tips

Video shows how to Add more Memory to the October 2009 MacBook

Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Macbook-09-BrainJust last week, Apple released a bunch of new Macs. You know what that means; it’s time for more upgrade videos!

To start out this new batch of upgrade instructions, we’re going to show you how to upgrade the memory in the new MacBook.

If you’re a regular reader of the OWC Blog, you should know by now that—dollar for dollar—adding more memory to your system gives you the best performance boost for the investment. Combine that with Snow Leopard‘s ability to utilize memory better than its predecessors, and you have very little reason for not putting as much RAM into your Mac as you can reasonably afford.

Fortunately, Apple made upgrading the memory in the new MacBooks incredibly easy to do. Just remove the bottom cover, replace the memory and then close it all up. In no time at all, you’ll be able to upgrade the stock 2GB of memory to 4GB or even 8GB!

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? See for yourself by checking out the video in our Tech Center or on our YouTube Channel.

An Interesting “Top Sites To Visit” List

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | Author: OWC Grant

globe-listOften these lists are pretty boring or cover a very narrow niche of sites. So, when I came across this “50 Kick @$$ Websites You Need To Know About” created by MaximumPC, I was pretty dubious I would find anything too captivating.

Wrong.

Being frugal and a deal hunter, the entry about Craiglook.com caught be by surprise. The lead in “Craiglist Gets Unstuck from 1995″ and a visual of what the results look like will now have me using that portal for all my buying and selling needs. For me, Craigslist is a blast…I’ve bought and sold such a variety of items that it truly is a one stop marketplace. So anything that improves that experience is a Top Site in my book.

As I only had a brief moment to check out the entire list, the other selection that caught my eye was What The Font. Now while the MaximumPC lead in was “Because Not Everyone Uses Helvetica”, any site that has something to do with fonts always catches my eye. The reason for that is because I have deemed OWC Chris here a “fontaholic” for his hobby/interest/whatever in collecting fonts. To me, that’s a pretty cerebral pursuit and really an appreciation of visual nuances that many of us just overlook on the superhighway of daily tasks.

So if those two sites are new to you or you’re interested in what you might find equally captivating, check out the list. And if all of this hasn’t been too thrilling then I suppose this might suffice for some real geek interest.

A Fresh Look At The “Old” Rules of Upgrading

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | Author: OWC Grant

About a year ago, OWC CEO Larry O’Connor revisited a recurring topic in his Tips n’ Deals Newsletter and OWC Chris covered that in a post on how the Rules of Upgrading rarely change.

Both of them explored five different ways you can upgrade your Mac to extend its useful life. Since some time has transpired, some new machines were released by Apple, and Snow Leopard has now become a reality, it’s time we take a fresh look at some “old” rules of upgrading:

#1 – Upgrade Your Memory
owc8566ddr3s16sI think we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve talked about how upgrading your memory gives you the best performance boost for the investment. Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 is a 64-bit (along with its applications) which allows each application to address more than 4GB of RAM at a time. OSX’s memory management now is a lot more flexible in keeping its cached instructions, lessening the need for a hard drive hit.

The bottom line is simple: Your OS and Applications can certainly run on the minimum memory, but having more memory installed makes for a whole lot more enjoyable and productive experience, all for a low investment. With upgrades ranging from $44.97 for a 2GB module for a MacBook, through 16GB of RAM for an iMac, up to a full 32GB of memory priced at $27.25 per GB to max out your Mac Pro, a memory upgrade is dollar-for-dollar the best investment you can make for your Mac.

You can find memory (and other upgrades) for nearly every Mac produced over the past two decades with our easy online upgrade guide. In addition to the instructions you’ll find in just about any Apple computer manual, we’ve got easy-to-follow free installation videos that further illustrate how easy it is for you to get that memory into your Mac. And if you need further help, it is just a click a way in our online tech center.

#2 – Upgrade Your Storage.
The big news for 2009 was the rapid pace of developments in storage capacity, speed, and overall performance. Now we’re talking up to 2.0TB for 3.5″ drives, up to 1.0TB for 2.5″ drives, and SSDs have truly emerged as a legitimate consideration. Since we promised SSD benchmarks in our last coverage of this upgrade, we’re going to focus on them here. I did a comparison of how SSDs measured up to hard drives and SSDs were the speed, reliability, and quiet running champs. Just how much faster are SSDs? Check it out: Article Continues…

Migration Assistant & OWC: the easy way to upgrade/transfer data to new drive

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Author: OWC Grant

MigrateAsstIt’s a fact the files we work with on a day-to-day basis are getting larger. As digital cameras grow more advanced, so do the sizes of the pictures they take. Music is now available in near-pristine, lossless formats and movies are now are in high-definition video with multichannel soundtracks. Then, there are the various applications themselves, many of which can take up multiple gigabytes. All this data takes up space and before you know it, your hard drive is maxed out.

When you find yourself in this predicament , you have three options: clean out some accumulated files, get an external storage solution to move files to and provide more storage capacity, or use our free instructional videos to put a higher capacity drive into your machine.

Cleaning out older files isn’t really a viable option. Eventually, your drive will continue to fill and you’re back to square one.

Transferring older and/or duplicate files to an external drive is often the easiest route to take and we make that option simple with Plug and Play solutions for Macs and PCs. Unfortunately, if you’re highly mobile and using a MacBook or MacBook Pro, carrying around that extra drive and the connection cables (even with a bus-powered pocket-sized drive like the Mercury On-The-Go Pro) adds a few more things to pack and keep your eyes on.

Which brings us to upgrading your Mac’s internal drive. While the thought of “opening the hood” on your machine sounds daunting, it’s actually very straightforward with our instructional videos that walk you through the process.

After upgrading your internal drive, transferring your data over from your “old” drive to a new, faster, larger one is just as easy when using Migration Assistant in conjunction with a fresh install of OS X. To show you how to get it done, OWC Chris has created step-by-step instructions in our Tips & Reviews archives.

And when you’ve got everything up and running with all the data you had from the previous drive, we even make it easy to retask that “old” drive, by either putting it into an external enclosure or using it with one of our Voyager hard drive docks. If you choose the enclosure route, we may even have an installation video to show you how to do that too!

It doesn’t get any easier than OWC for the tips, tools, and products you need to get more from your technology investment.

Category: Tech Tips

New iMac machines include SD cardslot

Monday, October 26th, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

features_ports_imac_20091020Back in August ,when Apple updated their MacBook Pro line of laptops, the ExpressCard slot was replaced with an SD cardslot.  Here in October, Apple again has added this feature to the entire iMac lineup. It’s located just beneath the optical drive on each machine.

This would be a good time to revisit my prior article: What good is the MacBook Pro SD card slot anyway? to learn how to make the most out of this added feature.  It goes into detail on making a boot drive out of an SD card as well as an emergency startup disk.

Additionally, the widescreen form factor of the new iMac lends to using the machines for multimedia displays.  An SD card makes a great medium for transferring your multimedia data between computers.  A DVD quality movie takes up about 2GB per hour of playtime.  With SD cards ranging from 2GB to 32GB currently, one could store up to 16 hours of footage on a single card.  More exciting is the introduction of the SDXC format which as early as 2010 could have us storing from 64GB up to 2.0TB on a single card.

I for one wouldn’t be surprised to see movies, TV shows and other media being distributed on SD cards just the same as we see CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs currently. Time will tell on that one.

CONFIRMED! OWC supports 8.0GB memory in Mac mini 3,1 machines

Monday, October 26th, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

macmini-20091020As mentioned in one of my blog posts last Friday, we’ve been busy testing the limits of the 2009 Mac mini models.  In late August, Apple released Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.2 which improves compatibility with the latest Apple memory kits on Mac mini computers.

It did a little more than that though.  It improved compatibility of OWC brand memory as well.  As all of our memory meets or exceeds Apple’s requirements for RAM, it’s no surprise that, yet again, OWC can support memory expansion beyond the maximum installed amount suggested by Apple.

We have fully tested all 2009 release date Mac mini computers with both Leopard and Snow Leopard and found no issues regarding which OS was used for testing a full 8.0GB of RAM installed.  Under both operating systems, the memory was fully utilized and no system detriment in speed was observed.

Keep in mind, this information is for Mac mini model identifier macmini3,1.  Intel Mac mini machines released prior to 2009 (macmini1,1 or macmini2,1) have hardware limitations that only allow those machines to max out RAM at 2.0GB and 3.0GB respectively.

Want to take your mini to the maximum? OWC has the Mac mini upgrades you need to make your machine screaming fast.

Still in testing, but 8GB may work in Mac mini too!

Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

I really couldn’t wait on this… this news is just too juicy to bottle up for the whole weekend.

While we’re not completely finished with our compatibility testing, early signs are pointing to 8GB of memory supported in not only the new October 2009 Mac mini models, but prior generation mini models as well.  We believe we found the “secret ingredient” that makes exceeding Apple’s recommended 4GB maximum in these machines possible.

Previous testing revealed prior generations of the Mac mini were able to boot with 8GB of memory, but sadly either did not utilize the extra memory installed or – even worse – made the entire machine slower when accessing more than 4GB of memory at a time.  In Late August, Apple released Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.2 and this allowed these generations to boot without kernel panic. However, we still found that most systems slowed to a crawl when exceeding 4GB of memory in the system.

So far, here’s what we recently found though: our OWC 8GB Upgrade Kit works in the latest Mac mini 2.26 and 2.53 machines and are consistently and completely utilized by the machines.  We then tested these same modules on the prior generation Mac mini (early 2009)… and found them to work consistently as well! All units tested were running Snow Leopard.

We do have more testing to do using the same memory modules with prior Mac mini generation models running OS X 10.5. We also need to do performance tests to make sure that the additional memory actually gives a solid performance boost when more than 4GB is installed. But at this point, we’re feeling pretty confident that our “secret ingredient”…namely the quality of OWC brand memory… delivers the reliability you desire.

Be sure to check back Monday as we’re hoping to complete our testing at that time and be able to confirm that we will support over 4GB of memory in the Mac mini, or if my excitement got the better of me.