Easy way to make computer faster?

I've had my computer for just about 8 months and recently it has slowed down a lot. Yesterday, it took way to long to boot up and today it would only boot up to a flashing question mark on a blue screen. Now I've seen this problem before on my old iBook that Apple replaced due to a problem in the harddrive that couldn't be fixed. I've backed up all the files I can but I want to know if there are easy ways for me to increase the speed of this computer that seems to be aging very quickly! How many GB should I leave free on a 60 GB hard drive? Is it bad that I have 15 GB of music on it?

Welcome to the Forum.
Sounds like some routine maintenance needs to be done. As Jim mentioned, Repair disk, run a utility like ONYX to clear the cache files, perform daily, weekly, monthly cron scripts. You might also want to consider something like TTP4 or DiskWarrior to become part of your regular maintenance routine. Personally I wouldn't be without either but having at least one is essential.

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An easy way to make a text box blink??

Hello everyone! So I can make a graphic symbol blink easy enough, but I am trying to "simulate" an electronic LCD screen, so I would like to display the value of a variable in a dynamic text box and make it blink. The idea is kind of like an alarm clock, where you select "set hours", and the hour field blinks while you change it. Is there an easy way to make a dynamic text box blink? Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks all!

you can use a loop (like a timer) to toggle the textfields visibility.

Is there an easy way to make mp4 (gopro)thumbnails visible in Organizer?

Hi,
I see different post about Organizer not being able to generate thumpnails from gopro-files. But they are all quit technical... So is there (going to be) an easy solution to make these files visible in adobe Organizer? Or which programm would be a good alternative for Organizer (wich I only use for video)?
Thanks for any advice.
Robert

Robert
A few things that we can do to see if they have any impact on Elements Organizer 12 behavior.
1. If you have not already, update the Premiere Elements 12 as well as Elements Organizer 12 to 12.1, using
Help Menu/Update. When the Update is completed, there should be the 12.1 notation at the beginning of the
Help Menu/About Adobe Premiere Elements and Help Menu/About Elements Organizer.
2. The Elements Organizer. You can create a new catalog (that does not mean get rid of the old, just create a new one
and designate the new one as the Current catalog. See Elements Organizer 12 File Menu/Manage Catalogs/Catalog Manager).
Also, the shortcut for deleting the Elements Organizer settings file (psa.prf) is as follows....
a. In the Premiere Elements 12 Expert workspace, hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys of the computer main keyboard as you click/hold
click on the Organizer tab at the bottom of that Expert workspace. Hold the click for about 10 seconds. Then release that click (still
holding down on Ctrl+Alt+Shift). You should see a pop up requesting permission to delete the settings file (psa.prf). Click Yes. If any problems
getting the shortcut to work, use the longer way....
Local Disk C
Users
Owner
AppData
Roaming
Adobe
Elements Organizer
12.0
Organizer
and in the Organizer Folder is the psa.prf (settings file) that you can disable or delete. To disable, change the name from psa.prf
to psa.prfOLD. Best to be working with Folder Option Show Hidden Files, Folders, and Drives active so that you can see the complete
path cited.
3. Background Information. Even though you are having problems with the file's thumbnails in the Elements Organizer
a. Can you play back the file there?
b. Can you import the file (as source media) into the Premiere Elements Expert workspace from the Elements Organizer workspace?
Please review and consider.
Thank you.
ATR

Is there an easy way to make JSpinner wrap around at max/min values?

I have several pages with a couple dozen JSpinners to set various values - mostly numeric, but some are not.
I would like to make them wrap around when either the max or min values are reached.
Is there an easy way to do this?
I was hoping for something like an "enableWraparound" property, but I haven't found such an animal.
I suspect I could add value change listeners to all the components and do it by brute force,
but there are too many spinners scattered around to make that an option I would like to take.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.

Ok, it looks like custom spinner models are the way to go.
Hopefully, I can create a couple that are generic enough to meet my requirements without too much pain.
It looks like the ones I have already created will be easy enough to modify.
Thanks for the feedback.

An easy way to make my animated characters eyes blink frequently

Hey
I'm making an animation movie, with a character that is in almost all the scenes.
To make him more vivid I want to make his eyes blink frequently. I made an eyelids object I can
cover his eyes with, so it looks like they are closed.
I would just put the eyelids on manually a lot of times, but I'm guessing there is an
easier way.
Can anybody help med out?
Regards, Christian

Great thanks!
I found this expression to put on the opactiy of the eyelid:
minSeg = 2.0;
maxSeg = 5.0;
blinkDur = .5
seedRandom(index,true)
segStartTime = -random(minSeg,maxSeg);
segEndTime = segStartTime;
i = 1;
while (time >= segEndTime){
i += 1;
seedRandom(i,true);
segStartTime = segEndTime;
segEndTime = segEndTime + random(minSeg,maxSeg);
if (time > segStartTime + blinkDur) 0 else 100
My problem is that I want to work in a 1 second walking loop I have made.
I tried to tweak the minSeg time to 0.1 but that makes it blink in predictable way.
Is there a way to make him blink randomly within this 1 second loop?

Quick, easy ways to make images look better?

What are the best ways to make images look a bit better? I shot my footage using a pretty bad camera, so quality already isn't the greatest, but what is the best way to make images look a bit more "movie-like"? The 3way color correstion is nothing for me, it's too hard to make images look good, they'll quickly turn too yellow or red, etc... Something to improve contrast maybe? Using Image Control: Brightness and contrast (bezier) doesn't seem to help much.

Okay, I took a couple of screenshots:
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/TheDarkBrickX/Random/film/afbeelding_1.png
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/TheDarkBrickX/Random/film/afbeelding_2.png
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/TheDarkBrickX/Random/film/afbeelding_3.png
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/TheDarkBrickX/Random/film/afbeelding_4.png
Now I don't know alot about image quality or color, but I think there is not enough contrast? It all looks very cold. Luckily, image quality isn't the most important thing in this project, but it would be nice to be able to touch it up a little bit.

An easy way to make iTunes find lost songs?

sorry for the messy header, I'll try to clear up:
just updated to a new laptop (powerbook->macbook) and little problem with iTunes came up. all the files got copied over perfectly, but when updating the Tunes to newer version the path from playlists to files got lost. yes, I updated to 7.3 but after reading here some bad reports went back to 7.2, still no help. so, all the files (songs) show up in the lists in iTunes, but have an exclamation mark inside a circle in front of them, and when clicked the program says it can't find the file. it also asks if I'd like to show it the original file, and when I do that the music plays happily.
is there an easy way to "batch-repatch"? I can't stand the idea of having to go through every single item in my musical library like this...
thanks!
Macbook 2,16 GHz Intel Core 2 duo Mac OS X (10.4.9) 2 Gb 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

It seems that I got over this problem very easily. Out of stupidity I didn't change the location info of iTunes Music-files (in preferences) when upgrading from my old laptop and changing the names of hard drives in the process. So for me the solution was simply to show the program where the files are currently located and go ahead and start listening to music.
I'm blushing over here.

How to optimize and make computer faster?

Hi there.
I was just wondering if there are any functions for "tidying up" the hard drive like with Windows? With time my Mac has become significantly slower so any ideas as to how I can get it back to normal??
Regards

Yes there are programs to help tidy up the system and possibly get you running more efficiently. If you simply run the "repair permissions" in Disk Utility on occasion that will help. There are a ton of 3rd party programs to do this and much more though...
My top 3 favorites are:
Regular Maintenance - "Onyx" (free) http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/download.html
Disk Defragmenting - "iDefrag" ($30) http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php
Directory Optimization - "DiskWarrior" ($99) http://www.alsoft.com/DIskWarrior/index.html
AND don't forget to BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM!
Backing everything up to a bootable external hard drive (Firewire preferred) is the best way to help stay safe and it makes it much faster and easier to do system maintenance. There are two preferred apps for doing this.
"Carbon Copy Cloner" (Free or Donation) http://www.bombich.com/
"SuperDuper" (Free or $28 for advanced features) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
I use SuperDuper and keep a full working clone of my hard drive on a 500GB external FireWire 800 disk. It's much more relaxing to know that even if my internal drive gets toasted I can always boot off the external and restore it back to brand new (current) condition with one click.
ALSO note, there are quite a few apps that will help clean out wasteful files on your hard drive. For instance, most apps include many language files that you may not need. They also contain code for processors you may not have. These are called "Universal binaries". If you have an Intel Mac and are running a program that has both PowerPC and Intel code, you are asking your system to possibly look through junk you'll never use. There are apps for removing all the junk and just leaving the Intel code. I've used a few and I have noticed a distinct difference in speed at launching most of my apps (DiskWarrior however said it was corrupted and I had to reinstall that one).
A couple worth mentioning are:
SlimTool (Free) http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/slimtool.html
CleanMyMac ($15-$30) http://www.macpaw.com/
Clean my Mac does some extra stuff and I liked trying it out but it seemed a little intrusive in that when I removed an App I didn't want anymore (using a different program) CleanMyMac launched itself. I didn't ask it to, I didn't want it to, and it troubles me that they obviously have something running in the background that they did NOT inform or ask me to run. But it does offer a lot of pretty good tools in ONE single app. Definitely worth looking at.
Also, browse the Apple Downloads section to find many others worthy of consideration.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/
Good Luck and enjoy!

Recommendation for fast Mac for databases or way to make Mac faster?

I've currently got a Mac mini 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1 GB RAM running OS 10.6.8. I'm on a quest to either make my current Mac faster or find the ideal mac for databases. I upgraded recently from 10.5.8 to 10.6.8 in the hopes of making my computer more stable and faster, but things are running slower. No wonder, Activity Monitor hardly shows any green memory. Apple doesn't seem to sell memory for this Mac anymore. So I'm wondering whether it's time to just get a new Mac.
What Mac would you recommend for someone not using videos, music, images on a regular basis? Would you consider any of them to be overkill for mostly running database programs? Or would any particular one be insufficient?
Thanks!

Well, almost correct. This computer is used primarily for work, which typically involves FMP or Excel, a browser, less frequently page layout software, Acrobat, emulators of older Mac OSs, and very rarely videos, graphics or audio files. The original problem that led to this post was with a large Excel file that started going haywire. Troubleshooting that led me to repair permissions, repair disk (nothing wrong), reset all sorts of prefs, and eventually install 10.6. After that install, Excel became extremely slow, and other apps also took much longer to open. So I cleaned up Font Book, got rid of unnecessary widgets, emptied caches, and otherwise tried to streamline things. The only startup item I have is for the printer. The other day I realized that Firefox is guzzling any memory that looks free to it, even if I don't have 50 tabs open. Followed steps recommended by Mozilla to solve that, but it seems to guzzle even more now (over 450 MB with 2 tabs open). I don't have Cocktail or Onyx, but maybe that would be the place to look next. I'll try resetting PRAM & SMP next.
I do want to start backing up the files I'm currently working on on an hourly/weekly basis, if not the whole HD. I've been lazy about that. Since that will involve buying an external HD, I've been putting it off to see whether it's worth it to stick with this computer (and get an HD with Firewire 400) or wait & get an HD with Thunderbolt. I dropped in at the Apple store yesterday to look at the new Macs, and they seem to be running fine without any memory guzzlers (even on those with just 2 GB), though the app startup time was a bit slow.
OWC looks great; I'd just have to either find a Swiss equivalent or wait till my next trip back to the U.S., which isn't around the corner.

Why is emptying trash so slow? Is there a way to make it faster?

I am trying to clean up my external hard drives, by moving things to trash. There are several several items, but this is A MacBook PRO and I thought emptying trash would be a fast process. It's taken about 24 hours to delete roughly 200 items. Is there a faster way to delete stuff?

Relaunch the Finder, then from the Finder menu bar, select
Finder ▹ Preferences... ▹ Advanced
and uncheck the box marked
Empty Trash securely
Try again to empty the Trash.

REALLY Slow Internet Loading--Is there a way to make it faster?

I bought a new Macbook 3 weeks ago at the Apple store. I am a long-time pc user who took the Apple plunge mostly because I am sick of getting viruses all the time. Unfortunately, I am pretty disappointed with the speed of the Internet and REALLY slow loading of websites--especially business websites (cnn.com, WAMU, Citibank, WSJ, etc.) It's not my wireless internet connection because I did a side-by-side test. I sat on my couch with my 4 year old Dell pc and the new Macbook and went to the same websites at exactly the same time. My old Dell was always faster loading each website and in some business-related or video-related sites, about 35-55 seconds faster. Is there anyway to make the apple load websites faster or is slow internet just the price I have to pay to be virus-free? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks,

Well here are some things for you.
the macbook has a 2.4 and 5 GHz wifi module. If you have a N wifi router, it may have the ability to process at the 5 GHz range. Un fortunately most receivers are operating in the 2.4 GHz range.
My recommendation is to lock your access point to either 2.4 if it is a draft N spec or G only if a B/G AP.
If you are using security to lock down your access point and are using WPA or WPA2, set the encryption to AES only.
If you have a draft N AP also set the channel width to 20/40
If you have draft N ad set it to 2.4 you will only get 130 Mb speeds on the Macbook. that is the limitation of not using 5 GHz
Check the forums of your AP manufacturer for known issues and make sure your firmware is up to date.
There is nothing inherent with Macs that make the internet slower. They use the same technology as everyone else. The issue is with how you have your AP set and how the adapter in the MB is setup.
I am going to go out on a limb and assume you do not understand the differences in the settings, frequencies, etc of wireless so it might do you good to learn a bit about it first so you better understand how to get the most out of your equipment. I hope what I have posted gets you started int he right direction

Easy way to make my site CSS friendly without changing everything??

I want to make my site CSS friendly but based on my research on the internet seems to be really tricky to do and time consuming. Do I just take out all of the pictures and just have text and save it as an alternative? What do I do to make my site "smart" so to speak and recognize if someone's computer needs CSS or not?

The main issue with the website as it stands is that there's no text on the home page.
If you offered a text-only version for slower connections (which I would not worry about), there would be nothing to show.
I would forget about CSS for now (there's plenty of auto-generated CSS already in the code BTW) and focus on these Google guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
I see allot of web sites these days that have that orange CSS in the address bar and I know it must be important somehow and wish to learn about it. Maybe I'm getting CSS mixed up in what I'm thinking. Not sure.
I think you're getting the acronyms mixed up.
That orange icon is an indicator of an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed available on the website, not CSS. It's known as a Live Bookmark in Firefox and allows you to stay in touch with sites without visiting them all the time.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html
http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html

Is there an easy way to make a long chapter into a book with many chapters?

I have a long, book length text file (50 chapters). It's one file in one ID chapter. I would like to make it 50 files in 50 ID chapters in one book (indb). Can that be easily done?
Thanks

You can "move the pages" which make one chapter in your ID file in the new documents and then save the new file, similarly you can do it for the 50 chapters and then compile this 50 chapters together in a book.

How to make computer faster after update?

I upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion a couple weeks ago and ever since the upgrade, my computer has been runnning excessively slow at times. It will occaisonally freeze and become unresponsive with the rainbow pinwheel. Any suggestions on how to fix this slowness? Thanks!

Open Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions.

Easy Way to Make an MP3?

Hi!
Is there a way to pipe a 'say' command to create an MP3? Something along the lines of:
say blah blah | command >~/Desktop/blah.mp3

or you can create a named pipe. and use that to pipe you data to the mpg3 codec, possibly lame. below is an example, of course you would not use dd you your script or command line, it's just there to show that it works.
mkfifo namedpipe
prw-r--r-- 1 andya andya 0 Mar 16 11:15 namedpipe
%say -o namedpipe bah& dd if=./namedpipe of=testbah.aiff
[1] 651
28+0 records in
28+0 records out
14336 bytes transferred in 0.001398 secs (10255764 bytes/sec)
ls -l testbah.aiff
-rw-r--r-- 1 andya andya 14336 Mar 16 11:16 testbah.aiff
%file testbah.aiff
testbah: IFF data, AIFF audio

Easy way to make computer faster?

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