I'm an apple fan for the most part but this is really sucking up more time than it should.
I'm running out of space on my hard drive and trying to clean it up. I have a few video events of some length that I don't really need but should be given to someone else.
I exported the first one to a quicktime format (.mov) to keep the highest quality and tried to save it on a thumb drive. Sounds easy enough.
It took 4 hours to export this iMovie project.
The file is over 4.7 GB in size. Even though the usb drive holds 8GB I can't save this file to the external drive!
It turns out that you can only move or copy a file less than 4GB onto a FAT 32 formatted drive. (Yeah, that's what Error 0 means in mac land). I need the FAT 32 format because the person I'm giving it to has a windows pc.
It won't fit on a standard DVD either.
Not sure why they limit the file size to 4GB but I'm not happy with them, whoever they are.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Making space on the Mac
Geek alert: This post is a bit technical and I'm not telling you to delete stuff off your drive unless you are sure but you may find this post helpful.
I've been researching ways to make the mac faster by making more room on the hard drive. I have found a few goodies I'm going to share:
First, open up finder and right click on the hard drive (mine says Macintosh HD)
Select get info and look at "Available" Leave this window open so you can see what you're gaining in space.
1. Empty your trash. Right click on the trash can and select "empty trash" If you haven't done this in a while (or ever) you should gain a fair amount of space and speed.
2. If you use iPhoto, here's a tip. Open iPhoto and select the trash file on the left. Right click and empty that trash too. Apparently, it is separate from the main trash and doesn't get emptied at the same time. Big space saver for me! If you have multiple users, make sure they do it too.
3. iMovie projects and events take up a ridiculous amount of space. In finder, open your home drive (probably your name). Open the movies folder and you will see two files, iMovie projects and iMovie events. Right click and get info on these folders. You may be surprised to find they take up more than anything else. This is where it gets tricky. I found that one movie took up 7 GB. I'm now in the process of exporting movies via quick time and saving them elsewhere. Don't touch the movies from these files, you should work within iMovie to move events to another drive. DO YOUR RESEARCH. Don't start deleting without knowing what you're doing or don't blame me if you mess this up!
4. Downloads. It's another folder in your home folder. Open this up and see what's there. Every time you save something it gets saved here unless you tell it otherwise. If you find a lot of files that end in .dmg you may be able to delete them. These are application installation files, not the programs themselves. If you download and install an application, these .dmg files (disk image) files get left behind. Again DO YOUR RESEARCH but you may no longer need these if the application is in your Applications folder and working fine. You could always save these somewhere else if you're not sure.
5. Email. I get loads of photos from friends and family. I've been saving the ones I want to keep in my iPhoto. However, now they are taking up twice as much space, once in the email, and again in iPhoto. New habit. Delete the email after I save the photo.
Good luck. Hope these tips help.
I've been researching ways to make the mac faster by making more room on the hard drive. I have found a few goodies I'm going to share:
First, open up finder and right click on the hard drive (mine says Macintosh HD)
Select get info and look at "Available" Leave this window open so you can see what you're gaining in space.
1. Empty your trash. Right click on the trash can and select "empty trash" If you haven't done this in a while (or ever) you should gain a fair amount of space and speed.
2. If you use iPhoto, here's a tip. Open iPhoto and select the trash file on the left. Right click and empty that trash too. Apparently, it is separate from the main trash and doesn't get emptied at the same time. Big space saver for me! If you have multiple users, make sure they do it too.
3. iMovie projects and events take up a ridiculous amount of space. In finder, open your home drive (probably your name). Open the movies folder and you will see two files, iMovie projects and iMovie events. Right click and get info on these folders. You may be surprised to find they take up more than anything else. This is where it gets tricky. I found that one movie took up 7 GB. I'm now in the process of exporting movies via quick time and saving them elsewhere. Don't touch the movies from these files, you should work within iMovie to move events to another drive. DO YOUR RESEARCH. Don't start deleting without knowing what you're doing or don't blame me if you mess this up!
4. Downloads. It's another folder in your home folder. Open this up and see what's there. Every time you save something it gets saved here unless you tell it otherwise. If you find a lot of files that end in .dmg you may be able to delete them. These are application installation files, not the programs themselves. If you download and install an application, these .dmg files (disk image) files get left behind. Again DO YOUR RESEARCH but you may no longer need these if the application is in your Applications folder and working fine. You could always save these somewhere else if you're not sure.
5. Email. I get loads of photos from friends and family. I've been saving the ones I want to keep in my iPhoto. However, now they are taking up twice as much space, once in the email, and again in iPhoto. New habit. Delete the email after I save the photo.
Good luck. Hope these tips help.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
How to speed up your mac.
Two interesting things I learned about speeding up my mac.
1. If you have a lot of clutter on the desktop, it will slow things down. I deleted a bunch of files I no longer needed and moved the rest of the files off my desktop into the documents directory.
2. If you don't have enough space on your hard drive it will slow your system down. In finder, go to your hard drive and right click to "get info" you will see the Capacity and Available. If Available is not at least 10% of Capacity, your system will be slow.
One extra goodie: Use the new "reading list" feature on Safari. I used to drag websites I wanted to go back to onto my desktop. This takes up more space than if you drag them into the reading list (it's the little sunglasses below the address bar).
1. If you have a lot of clutter on the desktop, it will slow things down. I deleted a bunch of files I no longer needed and moved the rest of the files off my desktop into the documents directory.
2. If you don't have enough space on your hard drive it will slow your system down. In finder, go to your hard drive and right click to "get info" you will see the Capacity and Available. If Available is not at least 10% of Capacity, your system will be slow.
One extra goodie: Use the new "reading list" feature on Safari. I used to drag websites I wanted to go back to onto my desktop. This takes up more space than if you drag them into the reading list (it's the little sunglasses below the address bar).
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
To Do today: Upgrade to iOS 5
10/15/2011
To Do today: Upgrade to iOS 5
iPad 2. download, install, restore took about 45 minutes. Of course, I didn't try to do it yesterday while the other 5 billion people were busy overloading apple servers. duh.
I still haven't upgraded my iphone 4, I don't see the benefit to rushing in. Also, iCloud is only available for os x Lion and I haven't upgraded to that either. Mobile Me is still working so I'll keep the old system for now.
By the way, the reason I haven't upgraded to Lion is that my quicken 2007 doesn't work on Lion. I'd have to switch my finance program again. I wish Apple would make a finance program I could stick with. I think the rest of the Mac world would agree.
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