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A Mac’s Adventure into Windows

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 | Author: OWC Alan

A lot of people might be apprehensive about adding a Windows emulator on their Intel Mac. I was too.

My wife received a promotion at work and needed the capability to be able to work remotely. We had purchased a MacBook Pro to replace my trusted 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 15”. It’s still a great machine and more than enough for what we needed it for down in the living room: checking email, surfing the web, family calendar, recipe database, and such. Unfortunately, her work is Windows-based. We started discussing getting a Windows laptop now so she can work at home.

Really? Let’s step back a second here.

I never really investigated running Windows on a Mac; I never needed to. So I talked to a few guys here at OWC about which method they prefer. Virtual machines? Parallels or Fusion? Perhaps Boot Camp is the way to go?

I turns out it was easier than I realized. Article Continues…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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Using Skype to Bridge the Gap

Thursday, May 6th, 2010 | Author: OWC Alan

How do you close the gap between a Grandmother and her Granddaughter?

How do you close the gap between the Chicago suburbs and the west coast of Florida?

In a word: Skype

My Mom is a snowbird. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a snowbird typically is a person of retired age who splits their time between their hometown in the northern regions of our country and some place nice and warm. When the snow flies, so do they!

She loves to travel and golf, but she misses my daughter. Enter the new craze sweeping retirement communities; some of her friends in Florida have been using Skype for a while. One day, my mom said to me, “We’re getting a new computer with a camera built in so we can Skype.” *

Wha?

My mom has to call me twice a day to figure out how to work my TV when she is home watching my daughter. You mean to tell me this lady is going to learn how to Skype?! Article Continues…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics, Tech Tips
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Get Drive Genius 3 Utility Suite For as Low as $39

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

You may have missed the brief mention of this when we mentioned it in last week’s announcement of On-The-Go price drops, but we’ve got some great specials on Prosoft Engineering’s Drive Genius 3.

Drive Genius 3 is built upon the same award-winning platform that earned the utility numerous industry honors including daily use by Apple at the Genius Bar as part of the ProCare Yearly Tune Up. Now running as a native 64-bit application to take advantage of Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”), Drive Genius 3 includes new features like DrivePulse® which monitors overall drive health and alerts on possible issues, RAID Support, and Email Notifications as well as enhanced Defrag, Repartition and Scan functions.

Drive Genius is a great program, but OWC makes it even better with our special bundle offer. Over 300 award winning OWC and NewerTech brand external storage solutions, enclosure kits, and docking stations now include the opportunity to purchase the full retail version of Drive Genius 3 for as low as $39—a savings of $60 off the retail price.

Did you just purchase Drive Genius 2? There may be a free or inexpensive upgrade in your future. To express its commitment to taking care of its customers, OWC is also providing a special discount upgrade path for customers who previously purchased Drive Genius 2.x from OWC. Any customer who purchased Drive Genius v2.x from OWC with an invoice date of 1/1/2010 or later will be provided a Free Upgrade to the latest Drive Genius v3 version. OWC customers with an invoice date of 12/31/2009 or prior will be able to upgrade to the new version for the special discount price of $39.00. All you need to do is visit our Web site to confirm your eligibility.

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Category: Product Spotlight, Special OWC Deals
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Welcome iPadders!

Thursday, April 8th, 2010 | Author: OWC Mike H.

OWC web site on iPadIt’s been only 5 days since the iPad launch, with one of those days being a holiday, and the iPad has quickly made an impact on OWC’s site traffic by accounting for 1.23% of macsales.com traffic. Granted, it’s not surprising that we got some iPad traffic as we’ve been part of the Mac community since 1988, but the amount of traffic we got so quickly was surprising nonetheless. One neat tidbit is that we got very light iPad traffic pre-launch as well, likely from reviewers and perhaps Steve Jobs himself – it’s possible right? Hi Steve.

Being the OWC Web Manager I’m always looking at the customer experience, and I must say Apple did a phenomenal job with Safari on iPad. Using the iPad you get the same full OWC web site featuring: memory for nearly every Mac made, external / internal storage, accessories, software, cables, batteries, adapters, tips, and install videos, for your Mac, iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad. All supported by OWC’s US-based on-site experts from our LEED Platinum Campus in Woodstock, Illinois powered 100% by our wind turbine.

Our videos worked without any modification… just press play! For all the hoopla over not being able to view Flash-based video, OWC customers weren’t impacted at all since we’ve used QuickTime friendly video codecs from the start for all our videos.  (Note to other web site managers: there’s other video formats out there… just re-export your vids, it’s not a big deal.)

On iPad the OWC web site just works, but now you get to experience OWC with the gorgeous iPad display with its superior font rendering, along with the future of computing that is Multi-Touch.

One caveat: anywhere we say “Click here” on the site… feel free to interpret that as “touch here” ;)

Of course we expect the iPad numbers to grow as more people are exposed to this paradigm of computing and we’ll welcome you all with open arms and a fully working web site.

Let’s iPad!

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Category: New @ OWC
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Changing the Face of (Mac) Gaming

Friday, March 12th, 2010 | Author: OWC Nick

Good news, everyone! Gaming is about to make a surge back to the Mac! “How’s that?” I hear some of you asking, fearful only bad news can follow that line. Well, the answer lies in the helping hands of Valve and its online service, Steam.

The Press Release from Monday confirmed what had been rumored for the past week in gaming circles; Valve will be natively supporting Macs — not emulating! — alongside Windows with all of its own game releases from here on out. Most notable of which will be a simultaneous Mac and Windows release of Portal 2 this holiday season.

If you’re wondering why Steam should be considered a big deal, then you should know that it is the most successful digital distribution system in PC gaming — estimated to be about 70% of the digital distribution games market according to research completed by Stardock.

OK, so Macs will be getting a few more quality games, is that all? Not by a long shot. Here’s the better news, from Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve, “…we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Furthermore: “…Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients.” Article Continues…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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A chicken in every pot, a Mac in every kitchen

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 | Author: OWC Alan

I love to cook. I do 85% of the cooking in our house and create, test, alter and enjoy all types of recipes. My cabinet is full of cookbooks and three binders full of recipes I have printed out, torn from magazines or handwritten in the hopes of trying one day. It was a fine system, or so I thought.

One day, my wife was looking through a magazine and came across an advertisement for a program that creates a recipe database. Ever the organizer, she recommended I check it out to tame the madness that is my recipe cabinet. I did, but found it was only for PC’s. I thought, “There has to be something like this for Mac, right?”

I was not disappointed. Turns out there are several Mac-compatible programs out there.  I downloaded a demo of MacGourmet onto my MacBook Pro, tried it for a few days and—wow! It wasn’t long before I purchased the software (a mere $25) and was adding, searching and importing recipes.

My first order of business has been to enter all the handwritten, faded, food-stained recipes I have stored in my binders. These are the recipes passed on from relatives that are irreplaceable, at least to a foodie like me.

A great feature of the software is the “Chef View,” an enlarged window with black and white text of the recipe in a large enough font that even my 75 yr old aunt Lois can read (she makes a darn good chicken parmesan). I take my MacBook Pro into the kitchen, open the recipe software and start cooking without the worry of spilling on my cookbook or measuring incorrectly because I can’t read the smudged type of a recipe I printed out years ago.

My Mac is not only a vehicle for audio entertainment, games, e-mail and web surfing. It is now an integral part of my family’s meals. All I have to do is back-up my laptop’s hard drive on my Mercury Elite-AL external hard drive (plus a quarterly back up to another drive I keep off site, just in case) and I no longer fear losing all the hard work and recipes I’ve collected. Article Continues…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics, Tech Tips
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Seeing the Light… the Mac is Good.

Monday, February 1st, 2010 | Author: OWC Patrick

I started here at OWC a little over a year ago. I’m a Senior Software architect that has worked primarily in Windows and Linux and have a brother who is a designer that works primarily in Macs.

Although I’ve done extensive studio work (I’m also a musician) where the engineers all have Mac computers running Logic Pro or Pro Tools, I’ve always viewed Macs as a ridiculous hipster toy rather than an actual computer. I held strongly to the view that unless it’s a huge oversized box, it’s not strong enough for my needs. I have a dell XPS laptop at home that’s an inch & a half thick and thought that was the best you could get.

On my first day here, I was handed a 17″ MacBook Pro with a 2.6Ghz processor and 4GB of memory, and took on the task of learning to work with this hipster toy. I installed all of the software I needed (Surprisingly, everything I needed was readily available, with the exception of Internet Explorer, which I use solely for browser testing, so I also installed VMWare Fusion to allow me to run windows to test web applications for IE compatibility) and got to work.

Article Continues…

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Data Backup 3 Updated to Version 3.1.1

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

data-backup3In case you didn’t know this, all OWC and Newer Technology storage solutions come bundled with a copy of Prosoft Engineering’s Data Backup 3 software.

Data Backup 3 is a powerful utility that allows you to backup, restore and synchronize your data with minimal effort. Whether you are a new computer user or a seasoned professional, Data Backup 3 offers you just the right amount of power, flexibility and ease-of-use to help you protect your files fast.

Prosoft has released an update to the program, which—among other things—improves Snow Leopard compatibility.

As with many utilities, updating to the latest revision is recommended for maximum compatibility and performance on your system.

You can find more information and download the latest version from Prosoft’s Web site.

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Category: Product Spotlight, Tech Tips
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