MacTricksAndTips.com

I have a lot of hard drives. For example my internal disk on my MacBook Pro is split into to partitions, one for Mac OS X and one for Windows. I have an external backup disk, this is split into two, one for Time Machine and one for a bit more storage. I am soon going to get another disk to use as storage. What I am going to show you in this post is how to partition this disks so you can use them for more than one thing. It useful to have a partition. Its easier to split up files, and makes organising them easier. As well as this you can have more than one disk format on the same disk.

Every time you boot up your Mac you hear the familiar boot up sound. But it does get annoying after a while. Disabling it is quite easy, all you have to do is mute your volume. But you have to remeber to do this every time before you shutdown. This is a pain. There are methods in which you can get around this. One uses a preference pane. The other involves creating files that run on boot up and shutdown.

This is quite a little interest on mine. Since I have a laptop I open and close the lid a lot when moving from one place to another. As a result some time I want to change what happens. For example keeping the Mac asleep when the lid is opened and keeping my Mac awake when the lid is closed. There isn’t any default methods of doing this within the system preferences. It needs a bit of hacking and using applications to work around this problem.

Nearly all applications on your Mac, especially ones made by Apple, have cache files. These cache files contain data to help your application run quicker and generally faster. For example they cache data which is used often so it doesn’t have to be calculated. Thats what cache files do. But these cache files get bigger and more bloated. As a result they can actually slow down the application, since they may contain data that is not needed but is still being read. It is easy to delete a cache file and let the program make a new one.