How To

Replacing a hard drive on a Mac may sometimes be necessary to either upgrade to increase its capacity, replace a faulty drive, or upgrade your Mac with a faster solid-state drive (SSD), which will often breath new life into an older system. While swapping out an older hard drive for a newer one is generally fairly simple to do, in Lion the upgrade may take a few more steps.

There are several ways of migrating data to a new drive for your Mac, but generally it involves either cloning the system or restoring from a backup (either by migrating or more

Microsoft's update to the My Xbox Live app 1.5 brought along support for controlling an Xbox 360 straight from an iPhone. (The update was rolled out across all iOS platforms, but for whatever reason, this feature only works with an iPhone.) Here's how to get it to work.more

This was a big week for Apple and fans of the MacBook and OS X lineup. But if you have Windows, you might realize that many of the upcoming features for Mountain Lion have already been readily available in some way or form. For this week's Freeware Friday, check out the following apps to access voice control, sync chats with your phone, set reminders, and more.

Dictation alternative:
Speech-powered computing might seem like a radical new implementation for many Mac users with the upcoming Mountain Lion, but both Windows and Mac users have had access to voice-control options well more

Although the slim, ultralight profile of the MacBook Air is impressive, owners must sacrifice a few features PC owners take for granted, like an optical drive and an Ethernet port.

Without an Ethernet port, the Air is a wireless-only machine, forcing users to find a Wi-Fi connection, even if there's a more stable wired network available.

Apple offers two workarounds: a USB Ethernet adapter and (new for 2012) a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. However, each of them will set you back $29.

Thankfully, there are plenty of cheaper USB to Ethernet adapter solutions out there.

Monoprice, the Internet's best-kept more

OS X offers multiple input method options to offer support for many world languages and regional input conventions. While this allows the system to be set up to work well for people from different parts of the world, the way OS X manages input methods may confuse a few who make use of multiple input methods.

For example, a standard U.S. keyboard layout will have access to the common characters and symbols used in American English, but this will not work as well for typing in French, where the need for common character accents requires a different input method. more

Digital photographs, whether they come from your point-and-shoot camera, dSLR, or your smartphone, contain hidden data. Most of the data is harmless, like the model of the camera and settings used in the shot. You might, however, want to limit the sharing of GPS data, which could reveal where you live, work, or where your kids go to school.

If you want to keep all the data intact, but make a scrubbed copy to share safely, you more

Many applications in OS X are self-contained applications packages, where all of the resources that the program needs to run are located within the .app file that you put in your Applications folder or elsewhere on your system. This .app file is actually a folder that contains the program executable, along with configuration files and other resources that can sometimes be quite extensive.

This approach to managing programs differs from the classic approach where program installers place them and their resources in specific folders or other locations on the filesystem (such as the system folder) that are needed for the more

In Apple's keynote address at the WWDC 2012 conference, developers received a "near final" developer preview of Apple's upcoming Mountain Lion OS to test their apps before the OS is released in July. As the release date for Mountain Lion draws nearer, Mac users have wondered what the requirements are for the upgrade and what they should do to prepare for it.

Apple has yet to release detailed specifications on the system requirements for Mountain Lion; however, specifications from its developer releases have suggested that most Intel-based Macs should be able to run the OS, provided they both more

Today might just be the perfect day to start shopping for a new MacBook.

And by "new" I mean "old." At today's WWDC, Apple announced new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, meaning there's soon to be a glut of previous-generation systems -- new, used, and refurbished alike.

The question is, where can you score the best deals? Yesterday's MacBooks are already gone from the Apple Store, so don't expect any bargains there (with one exception -- see below). But if you know where to look, you might just be able to score a MacBook on more