Macking 142

Corrosion in your Mac
It's been so many years since I have seen this problem I didn't recognize what it was initially. The symptoms were unexplained crashes, disk errors that didn't stay fixed, corrupted documents. All disk-repair tests passed. Turned out that the machine had been contaminated and corroded by tobacco smoke.
Yep, four years of continual smoking while working did the job. Cooling fans suck it in and layer it all over the logic board, RAM cards and slots, and all other electrical contacts. Eventually corrosion of the contacts on the circuit boards sets in and erratic and spontaneous interruptions caused the troubles.
There is no fix. The Mac had to be replaced. The sealed hard drive was okay, but that was it. Moral: It's more than just your heart and lungs that get corroded by tobacco. Never smoke anywhere near your computer unless you want to replace it every few years. If you quit, your body mostly heals; your Mac just gets worse.

Time to buy a G5?
The MacPro has been out for a while now, but there are a lot of G5 towers around, both used and refurbished, ranging from $900 to over $2000 depending on configuration. If you have an aging G4 or older, and you prefer a tower to an iMac or laptop, you might be happy with Apple's former flagship machine.
Besides private ads, the best places to buy are PowerMax.com in Lake Grove, PowerMacPac out by the airport, and SmallDog Electronics in Vermont. Just make sure you buy at least 1 gig of RAM, preferably two. The G5s are still popular and command good prices because they can run Classic and the Intel models cannot. Compared to the G4s, the speed is breathtaking. The only warning I would make is to avoid the water-cooled ones. They have been known to leak coolant, which overheats the processor immediately and is an expensive fix.

Hilarious Tales of Tech Nightmare
The Register is a British tech news and opinion site (slogan: Biting the hand that feeds IT) which is one of my daily visits. I like their cheeky, irreverent attitude. Read BOFH Tales. You'll laugh, howl, and scratch your head in puzzlement because it's so British. Oh, BOFH? Stands for Bastard Operator From Hell. It's been running since 1995.

New Flip4Mac
Visit Flip4Mac for a set of free components that will enable Windows Media files (except the newest ones) to play in your web browser or the QuickTime player. They have Pro versions for sale that will let you export WMV files as Quicktime and other features, but the free version is subsidized by Microsoft so they don't have to develop WMV for Mac any more.

ABC Dead to Macs
ABC.com has, as of this writing, just updated their Web player for Vista and as a byproduct lost Mac support. If they don't hear a steady stream of complaints from Mac users they won't bother fixing it. There is a complaint link on their web site. Until the change in late May it worked fine. I wonder where Steve Jobs is on this issue - he is the largest stockholder in Disney, which owns ABC.

General Tips and Reminders
Here are topics I frequently stress in this column, both for the benefit of new readers and as a prodding stick to those who have seen them before but never remember to do them.
#1 on the list: Repair Permissions. Do this every time you install new software. Do it both before and after running Apple's Software Update, or otherwise run system updates. Tiger (10.4) users might also want to click the Verify Disk button, at the bottom of the window opposite Repair Permissions. You want to find out if you are getting directory errors before they cause severe problems.
To do this, open your hard drive, open the Applications folder, go to the bottom of the list to the Utilities folder, open it and double-click on Disk Utility. On the left side of the window is a list of volumes, including your main hard drive. Click on that icon, the one with the name of the drive, usually Macintosh HD unless you have renamed it. That's when the Repair Permissions and Verify Disk buttons will appear. (OS9 users can ignore this tip.)
#2: Erase New Flash Drives and Hard Drives. Using the same Disk Utility, above, select the name of the new drive and click on the Erase tab in the upper middle of the window. You have to do this with new unformatted drives, and the Mac will prompt you when you first plug it in, but all Flash drives and many hard drives are formatted FAT 16 or 32, which is a Microsoft format. Although the drive will mount on your desktop and allow you to copy files to it, you should always make a Mac disk out of it with Disk Utility unless you will specifically be using it to move files between Macs and PCs. The PC format can be very destructive to Mac files under the right circumstances, and you could instantly lose every file on the drive.
#3: Block Popup Windows. This option is under the Safari menu and is easy to turn on and off when you visit a site that requires them. In Firefox it's in Preferences, under the Content icon.
#4: Turn Off Classic. Many people set up their Macs to start Classic automatically at startup, because they had Classic applications they were still using. Over time you may have replaced those classic apps, but Classic is still running, sitting in the background, wasting RAM and processor cycles. Go to System Preferences, click on Classic and uncheck the box for Start Classic at Login. If you still occasionally use it, check the box for Show Classic Status in Menubar. That adds an item with a menu that will let you start classic when you need it. Of course Classic always starts when you launch an OS9 application, but sometimes the process interrupts itself while waiting for classic startup. Best to get used to manually controlling it when you need it. Stop Classic when done.
#5: Turn Off Email Preview. In Mail, Eudora, Entourage and Outlook for OS9, there is an option to close the Preview window that displays a message when you simply click on the title. in the New Mail list. That makes it impossible to flag or delete spam without opening it. Depending on how the spammer configured the message, it could send a message home that it found a live IP address - yours. With Preview off, you have to double-click a message to open it in its own window.
#6: Clean up your Desktop. The more loose files you have on your desktop, the longer it takes to finish the startup sequence. Create a folder on there and put everything in it you have been meaning to deal with and name it TO BE SORTED. If you like to keep a lot of folders on your Desktop, move them into Documents and put an alias to the folder in its place. Aliases of folders are just as convenient as real folders and behave the same way when you drop stuff into them or double-click them.
Finally, open Show View Options from the View menu and choose Keep Arranged By Kind. That will cluster all folders, files, aliases and volumes by name. stacked under the main hard drive and any other hard drives you have plugged in. When you put in a CD, everything moves down a step to make room for it. Beats searching all over the desktop for it.
If you have a special way you have arranged things on the desktop and you don't want to move them off or use automatic sort, at least keep the area around the upper right corner clear so that disk images and CDs can pop into that space when needed. It isn't excessive to have fifteen or twenty items on the desktop; I have seen systems with more than fifty. When the desktop gets completely full (and sometimes before) then icons all stack up on top of each other in the upper right corner. Just try finding anything then.
#7: Wait Before Installing Software Updates. Apple screws them up now and again, so it's always best to wait a week or two after the first time you get a notice of a new update, security or otherwise. Give them time to find problems, pull the update, and replace it with a new one.
Not every update is necessary, either. If you never use iMovie or iDVD, you can click on the update name in Software Update and hit Delete. It will remove it from the list and not warn you again. If you want to be really informed about each update, bookmark http://www.macfixit.com/ and stop by every time an update comes out. I hit them daily. You will find out there if an update is a real mess (like iTunes 7.2) or if reported problems are few and sporadic.
Many times it's best to not actually use Software Update at all. Using the list as a guide, visit Apple's site, click Support, then Downloads. Download the .dmg (Disk Image) file and install with that. Save it in case you want to put it on another Mac or need to reinstall. If there is no Installers folder in your Applications folder, create one and always save your downloaded installers in there.
#8: Do not ask me again. Most dialog boxes that appear every time you launch some programs, including Firefox, iTunes and many others, have a checkbox with words to that effect. iTunes always asks you if you want to upgrade; Firefox asks if you want to make it the default browser. If you are always clicking NO or Cancel, take note of the checkbox and uncheck it. The program will stop hounding you.
Sometimes you want reminders, so be certain in each case that you will always be telling it NO before dismissing the warning forever.
#9: Use The Preview Button in Print. Almost every print dialog box has a Preview button. That launches the Preview application and displays how your document will look when it prints. It does that by making a simple PDF file in the Temporary Items folder. If everything is fine, you can just click Print at the bottom of the page. But if you are using it to see how a Web page will print, you may want only some of the pages showing. In that case, go to the File menu and choose Print from there, choosing the pages you want in the From ___ to ___ fields.
#10: Buy a lambswool duster. I got mine at Sheepskin of Oregon on NW Glisan for $5 but they are sold in other stores and on the Web. Accept no substitutes. It has a 6" handle and there is no better tool for swishing dust off of your display and keyboard. Not so good with CRT displays because the static charge they develop also attracts sticky oils from the air, but liquid-crystal displays attract only dust.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)