Host Yard IT Services » apple

Most Popular How-To Features of 2009 [Best Of 2009]

Fatofloccanna — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000

We cover a lot of tips every day on Lifehacker, but we get our greatest pleasure from putting together in-depth, step-by-step guides. From Windows 7 to Hackintoshes and beyond, here’s a look back at our most popular how-to features of ’09.

How to Do Everything with Windows 7

Windows 7 was a huge part of 2009, and the Lifehacker crowd was eager to try it out early on—but not necessarily ready to ditch XP or Vista outright to do so. This guide got you up and running with a Windows 7 and Vista/XP dual-boot system. Once you got it up and running, our complete guide to Windows 7 got you started with the most important parts of tackling your new operating system. We toured Windows 7′s best, most underhyped features, schooled you on its impressive list of cool new shortcuts, and detailed how to pull a little XP mode in Windows 7. It was a pretty good year for Windows users.

How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish

The Apple tax is always a little higher than a lot of people are willing to pay, so this year’s guide to building a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, start to finish, followed up by the simplified guide to install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC, no hacking required made a pretty big splash.

How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network’s WEP Password

Whether you’re verifying the security of your own network or up to something a little more dubious in nature, this guide to cracking a Wi-Fi network’s WEP password with BackTrack—followed by this WEP cracking redux post that took WEP cracking out of the command line realm proved popular.

Google Wave First Look

Google Wave made a serious splash this year, and while a lot of people still aren’t sure how to best put it to use, there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of interesting technology going on there. We did our best to help you understand how you might use it yourself, starting with our Google Wave first look, moving onto a few best use cases for Wave, and rounding it out with a guide to Wave keyboard shortcuts, filters, searches, and more with our Google Wave 101 guide.

Clean Up and Revive Your Bloated, Sluggish Mac

Feel like your Mac isn’t the speedy little box it used to be? Our guide to cleaning up and reviving your bloated, sluggish Mac will get your machine back to running like a champ. (PC users, we’ve got you covered here.)

Prep Your Mac for Snow Leopard

Windows users had the Windows 7 release, Mac users had the Snow Leopard upgrade, and this guide detailed how to prep your Mac for Snow Leopard for a painless transition.

Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap

The future of home entertainment isn't in your cable box as you know it today—it's in powerful home theater PCs. There was a time when you'd need a big, noisy box next to your computer if you wanted to impress with your HTPC, but this guide to building a silent, standalone XBMC media center on the cheap turns an inexpensive, tiny nettop computer into a standalone XBMC set-top box.

The First-Timer’s Guide to Building a Computer from Scratch

Ever been interested in building your own PC from the bottom up but always been a little scared of rolling up your sleeves with computer hardware? Building a computer from scratch is easier than you think, and it’s also one of the most satisfying projects a tech enthusiast can tackle.

Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code

Whether you just want to do some simple scripting or you want to start down the road to an entirely new skill set, our 101 guide for teaching yourself how to code is a great place to get started.

How to Fix Your Relatives’ Terrible Computer

If you didn't already fix every one of your relatives' computers over Thanksgiving, don't worry—the holidays are quickly approaching, and you know your the resident IT person for your friends and family. Our guide to fixing your relatives’ terrible computer can help.Photo by Justin Marty.

Cut the Cable For Good with Boxee and Apple TV

If our above guide to building a silent, standalone XBMC media center wasn’t quite your bag of chips, consider our step-by-step guide to cutting the cable for good with Boxee and Apple TV. You remember Boxee, right? They’re the killer media center folks who had to fight it out with Hulu all year, and they just updated with an impressive new look and feel. Photo by philcampbell.

Six Ways You Should Be Using Twitter (that Don’t Involve Breakfast)

Twitter may be taking the world by storm, but it’s often- and much-maligned by many of our readers. (47 percent of you say you’d never even use it.) Say what you will about tweeting, but if you’re not using Twitter for at least search, we think you’re missing out.

Properly Erase Your Physical Media

A whopping 40% of the used hard drives on eBay contain easily recoverable personal data. This guide details how to properly erase your physical media when you get rid of anything containing a hard drive so your personal data doesn’t end up in someone else’s hands. Photo by Robert Scoble.

The Definitive Guide to Finding Free Wi-Fi

Spend a lot of time on the road and out of the comfort of your home or office? Our definitive guide to finding free Wi-Fi can help you find some fast internet while you’re out of your home territory. Photo by °Florian.

The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Virtual Machines with VirtualBox

We play around a lot with various pieces of new software and even entire operating systems around these parts. Play it safe or just play around with our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines with VirtualBox, a free, open-source virtualization tool.

Use Firefox to Fix the Web’s Biggest Annoyances

The web is an amazing place. It can also be an extremely annoying place. Skip the annoying flashing ads, turn off auto-playing movies and sounds, skip the auto-refreshing pages, and more with our guide to fixing the web’s biggest annoyances with Firefox.

How to Build a Web Site from Scratch with No Experience

Ever wanted to try your hand at building a web site you've been dreaming about—but have no experience with web development? We've been there (I was proud to release MixTape.me earlier this year), and this guide for building a web site from scratch with no experience will point you in the right direction.

You’re Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way

Your data is the most important thing you've got on your computer—in fact, it's everything. If you aren't backing it up correctly, one bad move and all that information—and all those memories—goes the way of the dodo. If you're not sure if you're backing up the right way, this how-to will steer you in the right direction.

Ten Must-Have Gmail Filters Available for Download

If your inbox is overflowing and you feel like you’ve lost control, these 10 must-have Gmail filters will get you started slicing and dicing your inbox into a more manageable place.

An Exhaustive Guide to Saving Your Smartphone’s Battery

If you spend a lot of time outside your home or office, your smartphone is likely your lifeline to the rest of the world. Problem is, your pesky battery can die pretty quickly if you’re not mindful of how you’re using it. Follow our exhaustive guide to saving your smartphone’s battery and you may be able to squeeze a few more hours out of that gadget of yours. Photo by [177].

Make Free VoIP Calls from Google Voice

Soon free-calling functionality may be built into Google Voice (now that Google’s bought Gizmo5), but in the meantime, here’s how you can make free phone calls using Google Voice.

Hack Your Wii for Homebrew without Twilight Princess

If you’ve got a Wii and want to undertake a little homebrew fun, the Twilight Princess hack used to be the only way to go. Not so anymore, and our guide to hacking your Wii for homebrew without Twilight Princess walks you through how to go from zero to homebrew step by step.

Which Is Your Favorite Lifehacker How-To Feature of 2008?(polls)

Got a favorite Lifehacker guide on or off this list that we covered in ’09? Let’s hear about it in the comments. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can also gander back at the most popular how-to features of 2008.

VMWare Fusion 3 Makes Running Windows on Mac Almost Fun

sideeffectsactos — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:05:28 +0000

As we pointed out yesterday, more and more Americans are buying Macs, but going to the iSide doesn’t always mean you can leave Windows behind. Since 2006, every Mac that Apple sells has also had the ability to run Windows using Boot Camp.

However, for most users, the best way of using Windows on a Mac is using a virtualization program like VMWare Fusion, Parallels, or Virtual Box. These programs let you run Windows alongside Mac OS X all on the same machine.

As a Mac user who often likes to test Windows-only programs (like the Google Chrome browser) or needs to use Windows for a nascent VPN here and there, virtualization is the best way to keep me using the programs I like on both platforms as the same time. Today, VMWare is taking pre-orders for VMWare Fusion 3, scheduled for release on October 27th.

VMWare Fusion 3 was designed to take advantage of both the recently released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and the upcoming Microsoft Windows 7. I spoke with Fusion’s Product Manager Pat Lee last week, and he told me that more than 50 new features and enhancements have been added to VMWare Fusion to make the experience of running Windows on the Mac that much better.

Faster Performance, Improved Integration

VMWare Fusion was released for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and wasn’t really designed for the under-the-hood enhancements of Snow Leopard. VMWare Fusion 3 was designed for Snow Leopard and it natively supports the 64-bit kernel and allows users to run 64-bit guest operating systems, even if their Mac is running the 32-bit kernel.

Lee told me that he thinks VMWare Fusion 3 will offer Snow Leopard users the best way to run Windows, Linux or Leopard Server on their Macs. VMWare has also improved its Unity mode (where Windows applications appear alongside Mac apps in the dock and in the menu bar) and made accessing files, apps and documents from your virtual machine even easier and more seamless.

Aero is Virtualized. Finally

Over the past few years, the actual performance of virtualization tools has really started catch up with running a system natively — except for one area — graphics. Virtualized setups still lag behind when it comes to 3D graphics and gaming, but that gap is getting smaller and smaller.

What I think is some of the biggest news about VMWare Fusion 3 is that it is the first Mac virtualization system to support Windows Aero (in Windows Vista and Windows 7 and Flip 3D. iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro users should all have the ability to see Aero’s glassy goodness inside the VM. If you purchased a MacBook or Mac mini with one of the newer integrated Nvidia graphics chips, you can take advantage of Aero too.

Admittedly, Aero support is more superficial than productive — but this is a huge step in bridging that gap between native and virtualized system performance. VMWare Fusion 3 also supports OpenGL 2.1 and Direct X 9.0c — which means that depending on your graphics card, you can even play games in Windows without having to use Boot Camp.

Move Your Old Windows Machine to Your Mac

A large percentage of individuals buying a new Mac are also new to the Mac platform. Even if you plan on keeping your old computer around, getting all of your files and photos transferred to your Mac can be daunting — especially for the new user.

Similar to what another virtualization company, Parallels, is doing — VMWare Fusion 3 includes a new feature that will let a user connect to their old Windows machine across the network and copy that computer into a new virtual machine that they can access on their Mac. That’s actually pretty cool — especially if you have some other ideas for things you might want to do with the older hardware.

VMWare Fusion 3 is available for pre-order starting today at at VMWare’s site, the Apple Online Store and Amazon.com for $79.99. Existing VMWare customers can upgrade via VMWare’s site on October 27th for $39.99 (if you recently purchased VMWare Fusion 2, you can upgrade to 3.0 for free).

Mac users — do you use Windows on your Mac? If so, how? Let us know!

Tags: apple, mac os x, Snow Leopard, virtualization, vmware fusion, Windows 7