MacFixIt

Apple offers a number of options for securing your data on a Mac, including enabling FileVault for whole disk encryption in Lion (or home folder encryption in prior versions of OS X), and encrypted disk images for securing collections of documents.

In addition, as with other software developers, Apple has included options to secure individual documents for some of its programs, such as those in its iWork productivity suite.

To do this in iWork, create or open a document in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, and then open the inspector window by clicking its icon in the toolbar or by pressing more

Quarantining files has its benefits, but a current bug is causing some trouble.

When you first download a file in OS X the system considers it to be foreign and tags it with a quarantine flag. This flag prevents it from running if it contains executable code, at least until it is scanned and the user is notified that the file contains code and could potentially change files on the computer. If the file is an application, then when you open it the launch services will present a warning that the file was downloaded from the Internet. Once you confirm more

OS X accommodates a number of different keyboard types and layouts to support not only small and large keyboard profiles such as laptop and desktop keyboards, but also to support different language input options. The layout you are using should be automatically set up when you initially configured your system, but you can always go to the Keyboard system preferences and choose a different layout if you would like.

In addition to the options for changing your keyboard layout, the system should prompt you for configuration options when you plug a new keyboard in to your computer; however, even with more

Often when troubleshooting odd application or system behavior in OS X you will access the preferences folder in your user account to remove or manually edit settings for a program. While in most cases you will find the preferences file for an application directly in the Preferences folder, sometimes they will be in subfolders within the Preferences folder itself.

Usually this sequestering of preferences files is done by developers such as Microsoft or Adobe for their various applications or application suites; however, in addition to those from developers you will see a folder called ByHost that contains a number of more

The home button on Apple's iOS devices not only brings you to the home screen to see your apps, but is also used to bring up the multitasking menu and wake the device from sleep, which makes it one of the most frequently used buttons on the device.

Usually the button is quite responsive and will quit to the main menu after a short period of time, but at times when you press the button there can be a delay or it can even take a couple of tries before it responds.

If the home button on your iPhone, more

New Mac systems support the ability to boot to Apple's Internet recovery service that provides Lion users with an option to reinstall OS X over the Internet, instead of using a local boot disk to reinstall OS X.

In an effort to bring this ability to some earlier-model systems, Apple recently released EFI firmware updates for 2010-model MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems that enable this option.

In a new round of EFI updates released yesterday, Apple appears to be filling out support for this feature in all of its 2010 models, now bringing this feature to the more

Apple's knowledgebase articles are an excellent source for troubleshooting aspects of Mac systems and Apple's software. Apple links to them from numerous locations on its Support Web site, but recently a number of people have noted problems with accessing the knowledgebase articles.

In some instances when loading an article, the page will state that the requested information cannot be found on Apple's servers, but at other times the connection to the site has been refused or encountered errors with too many redirects or other problems that prevent the articles from loading.

When you are able to connect more

When you boot a Mac system you have the option to supply keyboard commands at startup to boot the system to alternate environments. For instance, a common option is to hold the Shift key to boot to Safe Mode, but you can also hold Command-V for verbose mode (a text output of items as they load), or Command-S for Single User mode, which drops you to the command line as the "root" user so you can perform troubleshooting tasks.

In addition to keyboard commands at startup, you can use the "nvram" terminal command to set a number of different boot more

The memory in your system, commonly referred to as RAM, is the work space the system uses to store executable code and loaded data. If your system is slowing down then you may be low on RAM. Although you can install more or free some up by quitting some running programs, first it may help to analyze how much RAM your programs actually are using.

If you open up the Activity Monitor utility on your system and go to the Memory section, you can see a pie chart of the system's physical memory usage, where generally the larger the more