MAC FAQ

Can a Mac run Windows and Microsoft Office?

Yes. Microsoft Office is available for the Mac, and Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files created on a Mac are fully compatible with Windows. Most other popular applications are available for the Mac, too. But if you need to use a particular Windows-only application, you have a few options: Boot Camp comes with every new Mac, and it lets you run Windows natively — as if your Mac were a PC. If you want to run Mac OS X and Windows side by side, you can purchase Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Fusion. Install one of these applications, along with the Windows Installation CDs, and you can run the occasional Windows program right next to your Mac applications, without having to restart.¹
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Is a Mac safe from PC viruses?

Yes. The Mac OS X operating system isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. And although no computer connected to the Internet is completely immune to all viruses and spyware, Mac OS X has built-in defenses designed with your safety in mind. The Mac web browser, Safari, alerts you whenever you’re downloading an application — even if it’s disguised as a picture or movie file. And Apple continually makes free security updates available for Mac owners. You can even have them download automatically.
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Will my PC devices (cameras, printers, hard drives) work with a Mac?

A Mac has hundreds of drivers for peripherals preinstalled. Just connect your device and, in most cases, you’re good to go. And a Mac is smart enough to know what to do when you plug in your digital camera: It opens iPhoto and asks if you want to import your recent photos.
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Will my keyboard and my “right-click” mouse work with a Mac?

Yes. The Mac is compatible with virtually any keyboard and multibutton mouse, even the ones you use with your PC. Just plug them into the USB ports on your Mac and start working. You can also use the Multi-Touch Magic Mouse or multibutton Apple Mouse, which comes with every iMac and Mac Pro, respectively. And the trackpad on MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air offers “right-click” capability — just press the Control key when you click.
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Can I work with my existing documents, music files,
and photos on a Mac?

Yes. A Mac can open most files from your PC, including Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), PDFs, MP3s, iTunes songs, WAV files, JPEGs, GIFs, and more.
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Can I join Windows networks?

Yes. If you have a network at home or at work, whether wired or wireless, a Mac will fit right in. You can share files with any computer on your network, browse the web, and get your work or home email.
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What about Wi-Fi?

All new Mac computers are Wi-Fi capable. Available wireless networks automatically show up. Just select the network you want to join, enter a password if necessary, and you’re connected.²
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Is a Mac reliable?

When you buy a PC, you’re buying hardware from one company and an operating system and software from other companies. Not so with a Mac. Because Apple builds both the computer and the software that comes with it, they’re literally made for each other. This means that a Mac rarely freezes or crashes. Occasionally an application might quit, but it won’t affect the rest of your system. And Mac OS X resists most viruses, so you can do anything — without worrying about losing everything.
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What software is available for the Mac?

Thousands of titles are available for the Mac. You’ll find everything from Microsoft Office and Rosetta Stone to Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Creative Suite. A huge collection of games covering every genre is available for the Mac, including top sellers such as Age of Empires III, The Sims 2, Guitar Hero III, and many more.
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How do I move my files to a Mac?

The best way to transfer your photos, music, documents, and other files is to let us do it for you. When you buy a new Mac from an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store, simply add One to One to your purchase. One to One costs just $99, and it includes Personal Setup, a year’s worth of face-to-face training, and exclusive group workshops. It’s all designed to help you get the most out of your Mac.
If you like, you can transfer your files yourself. And it doesn’t require much work. Here are two ways to do it:
Copy files from your PC to an external hard drive, connect the drive to your Mac, and move the files over.
Use a local network to move files directly from your PC to your Mac. For detailed information on moving your files to a Mac,

Will my current email service work on a Mac?

Yes. You can access your current email in two ways:
View web-based email — such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and MobileMe mail — in the Safari web browser.
Use the Mail application in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Simply enter your email account information and you’re good to go. If you have email messages in Microsoft Outlook on your PC, you can transfer them to your Mac using inexpensive third-party software.
No matter which method you choose, you can continue using your current email address.
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Which web browsers will work on a Mac?

Every Mac includes Safari, the fastest web browser in the world. You can also use Mac versions of Firefox, Opera, and others.
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Can I instant message on a Mac?

Yes. Every Mac comes with iChat, Apple’s instant messaging application. iChat supports AIM, Google Talk, and MobileMe. In addition to text messaging, iChat allows you to video chat with friends and family around the world.³ Microsoft and Yahoo! offer Mac versions of their instant messaging applications, too.
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What kind of support can I expect?

Every Mac comes with service and support that’s consistently voted the best in the business. If you have a problem in the first year of owning your new Mac, you can take it to an Apple Retail Store to get it fixed or figured out. And if you purchase the AppleCare Protection Plan, you extend your service and support to up to three years from the date of your Mac purchase. The Apple Retail Store also offers services like ProCare, which gives you priority support, and One to One, which provides personal training on your Mac. Each service costs $99 a year.
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Is it easy to learn how to use a Mac?

Every Mac is created with the guiding principle that computers should be easy to use, so you can spend more time doing what you love and less time figuring out how your computer works. If you’ve never owned a Mac, you may need a little time to get used to it. But within a week or two, chances are you’ll get along like old friends. And because all Mac applications are designed to work in the same, intuitive way, once you learn one application — iTunes, for example — you’ll quickly pick up iPhoto, Mail, or any of the other software that comes with your Mac.

Mac Data Recovery After Time Machine Backup Media Failure

Image by Guillermo Esteves via Flickr

Backup is the best possible way to prevent data loss. For this purpose, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard provide inbuilt backup utility- Time Machine. It works with Time Capsule and various external USB (Universal Serial Bus) hard drives. The utility enables you to create incremental backup of the files, which you can restore later. This backup tool enables you to restore entire system, several files, or even single file. If data loss occurs, you can restore all your critical data and prevent need of Mac Data Recovery solutions through third-party applications.

Time Machine is a complete backup tool, which has a great set of features. Some of the most common features of this backup utility are as given below:

1) Do not need regular attention- The tool works with Mac computer and external hard drive. You need to just connect your external drive and assign the drive to Time Machine. It automatically creates backup of entire system, including applications, accounts, system files, photos, movies, music, preferences, and documents.

2) Takes you back in time- If you have deleted your critical files from hard drive, just enter your Time Machine browser and you can see how your system looked on the date that you are browsing. With this feature, you can easily Recover Mac Data from Time Machine backup

3) Backs up every hour- Following initial backup of entire system, the tool automatically creates incremental backup every hour, copying the data that has modified since last backup. The backup process is preformed in background, so that you can work while Time Machine creates backup.

4) Easy Migration- While setting up new Macintosh system with old data, Time Machine helps you to simplify the process. You can use Migration Assistant for copying backup data to new machine, or use 'Restore System from Time Machine' option in Utilities menu on Mac OS X installation disc.

Time Machine safeguards your valuable data in every situation, but what if the backup media fails? In such cases, you can not restore data from backup and come across critical data loss situations. At this point, you are required to opt for Mac Recovery solutions to get your lost data back.

Data Recovery Mac is possible through third-party Mac File Recovery Software. The applications are specifically designed to thoroughly scan the damaged media and retrieve lost data from it. With read-only conduct and rich graphical user interface, the applications are quite safe and easy to use.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery is the best ever made and the most advanced tool for assured recovery of lost Mac data. It recovers data from HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper, and FAT file system volumes. The software is designed for Mac OS X 10.6, 10.5, 10.4, and 10.3.9.

Read more: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Mac-Data-Recovery-After-Time-Machine-Backup

What You Need To Know About Macintosh Data Recovery

For those who have their own Mac computer, learning how to do Macintosh data recovery is essential. Everyone who owns a Apple computers
think that they no longer need to worry because hacks and viruses can no longer get to them. But that is not always true because as time passes, viruses will be created. The Mac OS X in particular seems to have many weak spots. This is how data is lost in Macs same way as data is lost in Personal Computers
(PC). The fact that Macs statistically get less viruses does not mean anything. This is because as compared to the PC, there aren’t as many Macs in use out there.
What You Need To Know About Macintosh Data Recovery

Your precious eye candy Macintosh computer is still able to be attacked by viruses and hackers and lots of important data may be lost and destroyed in the process. The Mac hard drive may even crash. Also, some simple mistakes on your part will always lead to loss of data. Then there are also those inevitable physical shocks or damage to the PC that may causes data loss.

In fact when you look inside your Mac, you might be surprised to see many familiar parts that are also being used in any PC. There are viruses that target these specific parts. If that happens, your precious computer becomes infected. There are also specific viruses that will be able to infect specific applications in any kind of OS.

To protect your computer from such kinds of attacks, you should always keep a steady lookout for anything you are downloading as well as watching out for email attachments from unknown people. You should always make sure that you have a working and regularly updated anti-virus program. Finally, always backup your files.

There isn’t much difference between the process of recovering data from a PC and a Mac. In both, FAT or NTFS files in the hard drive can be retrieved. When deleting a file unintentionally, you can do a scan for these deleted data. Free data recovery software for Mac is also available online.

There are some data recovery software that is solely for the Mac operating system X. There are also those that have no specialization and can be used anywhere. Just make sure that you get the right one for you computer and for your needs. One can always call the Macintosh customer service in order to inquire on this subject and get leads on it. The manufacturer will of course always have the best of knowledge on these matters.

You should stop using the damaged or problematic computer. Download your Mac Data recovery software somewhere else. You will want to keep that computers data storage untouched so as not to overwrite on your lost file before you can retrieve it.

courtesy: http://www.articlesbase.com/data-recovery-articles/what-you-need-to-know-about-macintosh-data-recovery-1467690.html

How to Recover Lost Data From Apple Mac Computer

Data loss is a horrifying reality that may happen to any computer system, irrespective to the hardware and software configuration. Even the most reliable hardware (Apple Mac) and the most stable operating system (Mac OS X) may fail at any point of time and cause critical data loss situations. In order to retrieve lost data in all such cases, you are required to go for Apple Recovery solutions through reliable and effective tools.

You may lose your significant data from Apple Mac systems due to a number of reasons. The recovery solutions may vary, depending upon the cause and type of failure. You need to first identify the actual cause of system failure and data loss, before your proceed for Apple Mac Recovery. Trying improper recovery solutions may make the situations more worse and lead to further data loss.

The system failures and data loss situations are generally divided into following two categories:

Physical Damage

This type of failure occurs when the physical components of your Apple Mac computers (such as Mac Mini, iMac, Power Mac, Mac Book Pro, Xsan, and Xserve) gets damaged. The damage may occur due to power surges, read/write head crashes, spindle motor damage, disk controller failure, RAID array failure, server crash, natural disasters, and many alike. In all such situations, the system can not recognize your hard drive and thus the stored data can not be accessed.

Data Recovery Mac in such cases is possible with the help of recovery service. It is a personalized service, delivered by experts through safe and sterile environment of Clean Rooms. They use indigenous tools and techniques to ensure safe recovery of lost data. The experts have skills and experience to handle all data loss scenarios.

Logical Damage

The logical system failure may take place due to corruption to logical structure of your Mac OS X hard drives. It occurs due to file system corruption, hard drive formatting, operating system malfunction, virus infection, accidental deletion, and system metadata structure corruption. In these cases, the system may give you some errors message when you try to boot it.

To recover data in such circumstances, Apple Recovery Software are required. The applications are particularly designed to methodically scan the affected storage media and extract all lost, missing, and inaccessible data from it. With read-only conduct and rich graphical user interface, they are safe and easy to use.

courtesy: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Recover-Lost-Data-From-Apple-Mac-Computer&id=3568957

How HFS File System Volumes in Mac stores, allocates data?

Image by di_the_huntress via FlickrWhat is HFS file System?

I’ve been searching from a quite some time what exactly is the HFS file system, here is what I found out, HFS (Hierarchical File System) is the most powerful and poplar file systems made for the hard drives and the floppy drives on Mac OS X. It is not used as the main file systems on earlier versions of Mac OS X, but still it is used on the hard drives and other Mac storage devices. HFS file system uses Apple OS X recovery solutions for Mac data recovery scenarios.

How data is managed by HFS file System?

As I came across to know what the file system is I went on to discover what if the file system goes corrupt can we recover data from the corrupt file system if yes then how to do that. The findings are as under:

Allocation blocks: HFS file system it divides the data in to several pieces of equal size. To do such a partition the file system allocates a 16 bit field for identifying particular block that is being allocated. This limits the allocation blocks to be less than 65,536. Allocation block is the smallest unit in the disk space that is being allotted to any of the files stored in the hard drive. The block allocation Map tracks the free for writing and the allocated blocks. The HFS file system replaces the flat file structure with the catalog file that uses B-Tree structure to define the files. It makes search of the files pretty quick, no matter how big the file size may be.

Causes of data corruption in HFS file system?

If you are stuck in a data loss situation then the Apple Os X can turn out to the savior for the lost data. Let’s see how data gets lost in HFS file system.

The data is now stored in the form of data structures by the HFS file system. This file system not only takes care of storing the data but it even takes care of managing, accessing, and manipulating the data, and the data corruption takes place as if any of these metadata structures get deleted or damaged. In such situations Apple Recovery solutions work fine. Data structure can get corrupt due to various reasons; it can be due to improper system shutdown, operating system malfunction and virus infection. These I will term as the major cause of the data corruption, there are times when the Apple Recovery solution didn’t work as expected so for those times the data recovery software for Mac can be the solution.

What should be done if MacOS X is unbootable after software update?

Almost all Mac users update pre-installed software. As the updates are available freely over the internet and can be updated in four simple steps. The results or the effects of the updates are only visible once we restart the system. By now you must be thinking that why am I explaining the update procedure, well I am not doing so but the main point of concern is that if in case the system does not boot after updating then what to do in that case. The data might be at risk if you have not taken a back up on the time machine.

It happens if the updating is effected by a bug. Or the update is not complete with your system or if it is not performed systematically. As the system becomes unbootable your data on the hard drive becomes inaccessible too. It such a case you need to back up the data from the back up created, But for the worst case scenario if the back up is not able to recover the data then? Not to worry you will require a mac data recovery tool to recover the data.

Lets consider a real life scenario say you are updating the software m you encountered a error software update has encountered an unexpected error you need to restart the system. When you restart the system the system is not able to boot, hangs up with a blue screen. To make the situation more worst the data on the hard drive becomes inaccessible too.

You can recover the data even after that as what you need to do is you need to reinstall you Mac OS X on your system and after that you need to restore the data from the internal back up or the back up you've created on the time machine. The data recover mac software will only be useful if you haven't had created any sort of backup or the backup is not recovering the data.