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Mac OSX Noob thread of OSX noobs

Lax Mike

Neo Member
I'm having trouble setting up Bootcamp on my Macbook Pro. I can't get past this screen:
XtMR3.png


I downloaded my digital copy of Windows 7 and as you can see, have the ISO image on my desktop. I also have a flash drive plugged in, but it still won't let me choose to create an install disk. Does anyone know a way I can fix this?
 

Lax Mike

Neo Member
It proceeds to complete the tasks I checked off. I already installed the support software, and it won't let me install without a disk (It asks me to insert the disk if the second box is checked off), so once I uncheck them, I'm left with this:

G2jo6.png
 

Jasoco

Banned
Man. I can't get it to work either. Which sucks because eventually I'll want to install on my Air. (When I get it) You have a Pro, do you not have the DVD?
 

Jasoco

Banned
Try dragging both to the trash. Did you update it recently? Sometimes if an app updates itself it will rename the old copy, install the new copy and delete the old one. But Mission Control might catch both and forget to remove one? Try dragging them both to the trash from MC. If one doesn't exist anymore, it will disappear, but the real one won't go away. (It'll snap back into place.)
 

Pachimari

Member
You mean, I'll drag both icons from the Launcher (the one with all the apps) to the trash bin?

And by the way, will it damage the battery in my new MacBook Air if I keep the charger in all the time? Or charge it every day?
 

Jasoco

Banned
A) Yes. Drag them one at a time. If I am right, the fake one will disappear. If that does not work, go to the Finder and type Command+F and search for iPhoto and make sure that "System Files" is set to "are included" (This can be found in the list under the popdown list on the row that will default to "Kind" is "any".) and see if more than one app named iPhoto shows up. (When typing, you'll notice a menu appear that says "Filename contains". Click that to only search the filename)

B) No. Apple AC adapters are smart enough to cut themselves off when the battery gets full. You should still cycle the battery once a month, but no, there will be no damage to the battery keeping it plugged in.
 

Jasoco

Banned
Okay. So I am wrong. Sosumi. But I do and don't have any problems. Barely any loss in any of my batteries since I got the machines. Even my old 2007 was fine. Apple probably says that to cover their asses. Don't think you should always run it unplugged and only plug it in to charge. Don't worry if you need to charge it overnight that it will kill it because you let it go for a few hours more. It's not really something to worry about much. By the time your battery is worn down by overcharging you'll have bought a new machine to replace the new machine you bought to replace this one.
 

Lax Mike

Neo Member
Jasoco said:
Man. I can't get it to work either. Which sucks because eventually I'll want to install on my Air. (When I get it) You have a Pro, do you not have the DVD?
I don't have the dvd, since I downloaded a digital copy. Do you think it would be possible to burn the ISO to a blank disk, and then using that?
 
this is an iTunes question. How do I remove having multiple album covers for a single album? For example the album ArchAndroid has 5-6 different covers because under artist its Monae, Monae feat. Big Boi, Monae feat. Montreal..... So I have like 10 covers in album flow for that one album
 

Doytch

Member
Ken Masters said:
this is an iTunes question. How do I remove having multiple album covers for a single album? For example the album ArchAndroid has 5-6 different covers because under artist its Monae, Monae feat. Big Boi, Monae feat. Montreal..... So I have like 10 covers in album flow for that one album
I do it through the 'info' pop-up, Cmd+I on the songs IIRC. There's a tab for album covers, and if you drag an image onto the spot, it'll overwrite all the covers with the one you dragged.
 

TxdoHawk

Member
Lax Mike said:
I don't have the dvd, since I downloaded a digital copy. Do you think it would be possible to burn the ISO to a blank disk, and then using that?

You should have zero issues doing this as long as it's a legit image. In fact, OS X has a progam called Disk Utility built-in that will let you burn that ISO to a DVD.
 
Doytch said:
I do it through the 'info' pop-up, Cmd+I on the songs IIRC. There's a tab for album covers, and if you drag an image onto the spot, it'll overwrite all the covers with the one you dragged.


I don't see an artwork tab but just an artwork box


I selected all the songs at once, that's why I got that



edit 3: I did that and all the songs have the same over but it's still showing up as multiple covers
 

Jasoco

Banned
Lax Mike said:
I don't have the dvd, since I downloaded a digital copy. Do you think it would be possible to burn the ISO to a blank disk, and then using that?
I believe so. Try it. What do you have to lose except a blank DVD?
 

Jasoco

Banned
Did you burn the ISO to a DVD? I'd still like to know the easy way to install onto an optical-less Air for when I get mine so I won't have to buy an optical drive just to install it.
 

Lax Mike

Neo Member
Yeah, I burned the ISO to a blank DVD, and had to grab another DVD to burn the support software onto, and after that, it went along smoothly.
 

Jasoco

Banned
You could have used a USB stick for the support software instead of wasting a DVD. I used my SD card. You can also use a small partition on an external HD.
 

Particle Physicist

between a quark and a baryon
Now that Neogaf is back, I'm looking for a program that will block it from me.

So a while back someone posted an awesome program that allowed you to input a website and a time frame in which it would block access to the site. The thing still worked even if you quit the program, shut down the computer and restarted. It was great, but since then I upgraded to a new computer and forgot all about the program. Anyone know of it, or something similar?

EDIT

Found it!!

it's called Self Control: http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/

in case anyone else wants it.
 

Jasoco

Banned
What are we looking at here?

Are you trying to bring attention to the enormous amount of leaked RAM in the pie chart? (The blue)

Or the amount of Chrome processes? Which aren't using much of anything anyway.

Because the memory leak is something I'm having on my Mac mini, but it isn't caused by Chrome because I don't run a browser on it often. It's either Transmission or Lion itself.

Also, it's not the Chrome processes because, well, so what if Chrome has a bunch of processes? OS X is based on UNIX which runs everything under two base processes named "launchd" and "kernel_task".

Change your list view to "All Processes, Hierarchially" to see them as parent/child groups.

Ooooor, is it Flash? Because yeah, Flash sucks. So much. But is sometimes a necessary evil.

For me, my Flash is only using 161MB. But I have another "Chrome Renderer" using 600MB for some reason. Gonna figure out which one of the 5 tabs I have it is.

Edit: Well, turns out it was the Vulture article on what Community's hiatus means for the show.
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainmen...s-your-questions-about-communitys-future.html

Weird. Though I have had it open for days, I now moved it to my ReadItLater list and closed the tab.
 
Specifically Shockwave. It'll sometimes cause a massive RAM leak or CPU usage, even with one flash video playing. It'll slow down the entire browser. This happens once a day. I don't see this issue on my windows machine
 

Barrett2

Member
Is anyone using the application Self Control? I just downloaded it, seems great. You create a blacklist of sites, it locks those down for a set time, and you have no way of getting to those sites until the timer runs out.

Any thoughts on this application? Anything better? I work at home twice a week, and for the last month I have very few short term assignments to work on, I am supposed to be working on really long term, boring things that I am rarely held accountable for. As a result, I *really* need something to keep me on track, away from various sites so that I can get some work done.
 

Futureman

Member
if I bought my iMac at Best Buy, it's still under the standard Apple 1-year warranty and I can take it into a Genius Bar, right? Do I have to show them a receipt from Best Buy or something so they know when my 1 year started?

Basically there are spots on the top right corner of my 27" iMac's screen. It's most noticeable if you put an all white rectangle at full screen in Photoshop. I have a dark background on my desktop and there isn't noticeable at all.
 

Particle Physicist

between a quark and a baryon
Is anyone using the application Self Control? I just downloaded it, seems great. You create a blacklist of sites, it locks those down for a set time, and you have no way of getting to those sites until the timer runs out.

Any thoughts on this application? Anything better? I work at home twice a week, and for the last month I have very few short term assignments to work on, I am supposed to be working on really long term, boring things that I am rarely held accountable for. As a result, I *really* need something to keep me on track, away from various sites so that I can get some work done.


Since I am the one that posted about Self Control, I guess I am a little biased. I like it quite a bit.

A friend of mine just showed me a Chrome extension which is pretty damn good as well:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji

It works a bit different. It allows you to set a certain time limit for Access to time wasting sites (like neogaf). Once the time runs out, you have to wait until the next day before you can access it again. It's pretty good, but it's only for Chrome.
 
So I fixed my laptop (kinda). All that needed to be wiped were the System Files, so after I got rid of those, reinstalling went without a hitch. The thing is, though, when setting it up as a new computer, it gave me a different username than I had previously. So I had to go through my old user's home folder and symlink everything in it that was important into my new user's home folder. In some cases I just copied stuff instead of symlinking it (usually in cases where the name would conflict). The problem that's arisen because of this is that while I was able to save my iTunes library, I wasn't able to save the playcounts for anything in it. Anyone know any way I can get my playcounts back? I tried copying over my .itl file with a previous one, but that didn't work...

Edit: nvm, I just copied it over with the wrong file. Did it with the right one and now it worked. Yay!
 
Okay just bought my first Mac, the 21.5 inch iMac!

Any suggestions on anything I should read, such as other forum threads?

Also what applications should I download?

Any good shortcuts?

Also one last thing, why is the scrolling in Steam so fucking janky?

Thanks for any advice in advance!
 
It turns out my firewire port on my brand new macbook pro does not work. I'm a little bit annoyed that something so expensive is faulty from the start.

I tried resetting the SMC, PRAM AND NVRAM but nothing seems to work.
 
Also one last thing, why is the scrolling in Steam so fucking janky?
Because Valve primarily developed it for Windows, so they didn't bother accounting for multitouch scrolling. Use a mouse with an actual scroll wheel if you can, I've found that works better for me at least. I agree though, the Mac Steam client overall is just really janky in general and obviously wasn't natively developed.
 
Okay just bought my first Mac, the 21.5 inch iMac!

Any suggestions on anything I should read, such as other forum threads?

Also what applications should I download?

Any good shortcuts?

Also one last thing, why is the scrolling in Steam so fucking janky?

Thanks for any advice in advance!
Check out this wonderful thread by giga for a great list of apps. Also there's the OS X Lion thread which might be useful.

The most useful shortcuts for me are the shortcuts for taking screenshots:

⌘+Shift+3 : Takes a screenshot of the entire screen, saves it to your Desktop
⌘+Shift+4 : Lets you drag out an area you want to take a screenshot of. If you press space you can click on any window and it will take a screenshot just of that window.

Steam in general is janky on OS X because Valve does't pay a whole lot of attention to making it feel like a native app.
 

JMizzlin

Member
About to do a HDD reformat to remove a botched W7 partition however have a few questions.

I'm currently running Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro however have lost the install disc, so reformatting on the Snow Leopard OSX is not possible.

If I upgrade to OSX Lion and reformat my HDD am I able to install Lion without an install disc?

Furthermore, I have a new copy of W7 and would like to use Bootcamp to install it. Once again, however, I am lacking an OSX install disc. Will upgrading to Lion allow me to use Bootcamp to install W7 without a disc?

Thanks a lot.
 

Pachimari

Member
This is weird, what am I supposed to do?
I can't restart or turn off my MacBook Air, as the Mail app is running in the background. I'm asked to quit it but I can't, there's not even a 'force quit' in the right-click menu. =/

Edit: I did a CTRL + CMD + EJECT and it helped restart it.
 

Jasoco

Banned
Strange. Can you open Terminal.app (In /Applications/Utilities/) and type killall mail? Or killall mail.app? (Not sure if the first would be too generic so try the one with .app first)

Failing that, if you're on Lion, don't be afraid to just shut it down by holding Power. Lion can handle it. It's not something you do lightly, but if you have to, you won't lose anything.

Edit: Nevermind. Good for you. Still. It was probably a Zombie Process. Something that's there, but it's not. It happens occasionally and keeps the computer from shutting down because it's running, but the OS can't find it to stop it. Who knows what causes it.
 

Jasoco

Banned
I was going to say duct tape, but I figured black electrical tape matches the black bezel of the computer better. Unless he has a silver bezel in which case duct tape works better. But if it's a white MacBook, well you're on your own there.
 
Well this isn't a software problem but it's a damn annoying hardware problem

My track pad is stupidly sensitive and I can't two figner scroll as it just does a two finger click instead

What I did yesterday was take my battery out and the track pad worked PERFECTLY. It made me physically press down hard on the trackpad like it was brand new. I put the battery pack in again today and the same problems arise.

Anyone experienced this on a MBP Late 2008 Unibody machine?
 
Well this isn't a software problem but it's a damn annoying hardware problem

My track pad is stupidly sensitive and I can't two figner scroll as it just does a two finger click instead

What I did yesterday was take my battery out and the track pad worked PERFECTLY. It made me physically press down hard on the trackpad like it was brand new. I put the battery pack in again today and the same problems arise.

Anyone experienced this on a MBP Late 2008 Unibody machine?

Do you have tap-to-click turned on in the trackpad settings?
 
Do you have tap-to-click turned on in the trackpad settings?

Yeah it's been on forever. The problem is that it clicks even when im just scrolling or barely tapping the trackpad

Even pressing the trackpad doesn't depress down as much when I keep the battery in, when I take it out I have to press down much harder and more naturally
 
Is Pages worth anything? I currently have the latest version of Word, but it's a bit heavy and sluggish.

Is the latest version of Pages a good alternative for Word? (and will Word documents with stylings, structures, boxes and so on work fine in the new Pages?)
 
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