TECHNICAL XENDER

Back up your Mac Back up your Mac Okay, so we know that people haven't actually forgotten they can back up with their but we also know that so many people don't bother. Please do! Ever since OS X 10.5 Apple has made it easy to back up using Time ne. Ideally you should be doing other things to back up as well, but at least do Time ne; you can pick up a 2TB drive for less than sixty quid. Go on. Do it today.

See what your Mac's up to with Activity Monitor See what your Mac's up to with Activity Monitor If you find your s running slow, or the fans are kicking in when you don't appear to be doing anything too intensive, you can see if you can identify what's causing it. Activity Monitor in OS X shows you how your resources are being used. Launch Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder to see current processes, and the resources they take up. The columns show you things such as the CPU usage of a process or the RAM it's taking up. If there's a process that's hogging resources and you're confident it's not needed, you can end it by selecting it, then clicking Quit Process. If you're just curious about how system resources are being used, click the tabs (CPU, System Memory and so on) to see graphs of your usage over time.

Have things ready at log-in In MAC Have things ready at log-in In MAC If there are certain apps that you'll always want to have open when you start up your you can set this up in System Preferences. Go to Users, make sure your user account is highlighted Click Login Items. Click the and you can choose an application, file server or pretty much anything else that should open when you log in. Once you've added something, you can use the checkboxes to opt to hide it, though it will still be running in the background. Having lots of these set up can make your lower to start up, though, so if you need to speed things up and temporarily don't need them running, hold Shift while OS X is logging you in to suppress them.

Change which app a file is opened with In Mac Change which app a file is opened with In Mac If you want a file to open in an app other than its default, select the file and press CommandI, to show its information. In the 'Open with:' section, use the drop-down menu to choose a new app. If you just close the window here, that change will only be applied to that one file; If you want other files of that type to use that same app, click 'Change All...' beneath the drop-down menu.

Paste text without keeping its formatting In Mac Paste text without keeping its formatting In Mac When you copy text from some applications, and especially from the web, you tend to also copy its formatting, such as the text size, font choice and so on. When you then paste this into some text fields, such as in an email, it looks out of place, and can make things hard to read. To paste the text without its original formatting (so it just formats in the same way as the rest of what you're pasting into), instead of pressing CommandV, press OptionShiftCommandV. Microsoft Word actually has a 'Paste Special...' menu option to do the same thing.

Take control of your windows In Mac. Take control of your windows In Mac You can be quite flexible when it comes to windows in OS X - not only can you drag from any side to resize them these days, but you can also hold Option to resize them from two sides at once (the one you're dragging and the opposite one), or hold Shift to resize it while keeping it locked to the same proportions. And while we're talking about windows, if you want to move any that are in the background without bringing them to the fore, hold Command and then drag them around.

Retrieve or Recover your forgotten passwords In Mac Retrieve or Recover your forgotten passwords In Mac If you can't remember one of your login passwords for a website, you might be able to recover it from Keychain Access. Run Keychain Access from Utilities, then look in the list for the website you're after. Right-click on it and select 'Copy Password to Clipboard'. You'll then be asked for your user login password to prove that you're really you. Enter that and the missing password will be copied, so you can just paste it into the log-in field.