to being with there seems to be a lot of mac questions on here so if people are sick of them then please direct me to a website that could help. Secondly i am a mac novice therefore these problems could possibly be fixed quite easily, thirdly i have not really done much as to ‘setting up’ my mac since i bought it, mostly just run it straight as it was and installed a bunch of programs, fourthly right now i agree with all the mac haters!

-Problem No. 1: It seems that i am unable to export files to pretty much all external devices, e.g. with all my friends usb sticks or hard drives i just can not seem to be able to copy any files to them, it works with my one usb but thats it?

-Problem No. 2: If i dele something from my usb or my phone when it is connected to my mac through finder, it doesn’t seem to actually delete it, visually it deleted the file as in you can not see it in finder any more, however it doesn’t seem to actually delete the file from the device as in no memory space is actually freed up?

-Problem No. 3: I have bought quite a high spec macbook pro, its a 15″ with 2.2ghz i7 processor 4gb ram, 1gb dedicated graphics with lion and bla bla bla… but its seems to be slow as funk and its really p***ing me off. Ive paid for such an expensive computer and it can hardly handle anything. It would run autoCAD and photoshop and sketch up together with no problem at the beginning so I’m guessing its something i have done. But at the moment for example i am running; photoshop, safari, pages, iPhoto and a couple of tiny apps like evernote at once and it has a blooming fit, constantly getting the rainbow loading wheel and kind of freezing.

-Problem No. 4: possibly the same as above, but when running a few programs safari often has a fit, just doesn’t load any pages and freezes then after a while asks me if i would like to force reload all the tabs i have open, i am maybe running 5-8 tabs at once. Also seems to be a problem with youtube and when playing things like inplayer for the radio… if you open a tab with youtube in it doesn’t automatically play, i have to wait on the page until it decides to start loading/playing otherwise if i go on another tab until it has loaded it just does not begin. I am sure a lot of you will say safari is a crap browser and i might well agree but i like it because you can use the two finger gestures for back and forward on a web page, however if you think using another browser will be a lot better then I’m willing to change (do any other browsers use this gesture yet? if so I’m there).

-Problem No. 5: The screen brightness just seems to change by itself at random times and it well winds me up! i didn’t ask it to!

-Problem No. 6: how the heck do you make a pdf? are there any programs or apps that will do it? or is there a similar method like on windows where you can just select a bunch of compatible files in explorer right click and select combine into one pdf? if so how do you do that on a mac?

if you need a list of the apps I’ve installed, incase you can suggest any are bugging up my laptop i shall post.

I love some of the features the mac has over windows however at the moment its annoying me more than its helping me!

I’m sure theres some other problems I’ve come across but i can’t remember them all, and I’m sure there is some things i could do to ‘set up’ my mac etc when i buy it new which i probably haven’t done yet which might well help, if so name some things that might help me out.

Sorry for the long post but any help is much appreciated as I’m trying to complete my c.v. at the moment on photoshop and its driving me nuts!

Problem 2, delete the items from the recycle bin too.

Problem 5, go into system settings and turn the “auto brightness with ambient light” option off on the display settings

Prob 1 – How are the other devices formatted? If they are NTFS they will not work with your MB, unless you install something like Paragon NTFS.

Prob 2 – You need to empty the recycle bin for it to be properly deleted and regain storage space.

Prob 3 – It’s something you have done/it’s broken

Prob 4 – It’s something you have done/it’s broken

Prob 5 – Settings > Displays Uncheck ‘automatically adjust brightness’ …or similar, my iMac has a diff setting to the portables.

Prob 6 – OS X can create PDFs. When you click on Print from the File menu or hit Command-P, look at the lower left corner of the print dialog box. You’ll see a menu called “PDF” click on the menu, and the first option you’ll see is “Save as PDF…”

Prob 7 – There is no prob 7, but reading the manual/Apple support pages may help for future reference.

2 bits of advice:

1. iPhoto 11 is pants. I have a newish iMac (Sept last year) and 90% of my grumbles with the Mac are when trying to use iPhoto, including unresponsiveness.

2. I too wanted to use Safari because of the multi-touch stuff, but hated the lack of a single search/address box. Chrome now has similar multi-touch gesture support so try that.

ok thankyou for the sharp replies guys

problem 5: fixed that was simple

2: are you saying i need to delete the items in my recycle bin when i have the device still attached i imagine? If so, with my phone how do i manage to delete items previously deleted but seem to not have freed up any space, as i can’t format the sd card in that as its an htc desire android phone and has the os on it?

6: i read that, however if i click on print i don’t have any printer installed it claims on some programs so can’t get to that option. Also how would i combine several pdfs into one? is there an app for that or a similar method you described?

1: the devices will just be the standard format they come as when you buy them, i think that is ntfs no?

2 – Yes

6 – Which programs?

1 – It could well be, some manufacturers ship as NTFS some might still do FAT32. Either way, without a 3rd party app like Tuxera or Paragon you will not be able to write to them if NTFS. Plug them in, open disk utility (applications>utilities>disk utility) and it will tell you what file system is.

still tortoise…

i have also read iPhoto is pants on several occasions, I’m guessing this is more the way it runs than the interface as i quite like the interface and the ease of which you can upload photos. Can you suggest another program similar to that instead?

i shall give chrome a go as i do much prefer that since i have a bunch of google accounts and always used it on windows

iPhoto looks great and I too like the ease of uploading photos. However it is unresponsive, buggy and stores the photos on the HDD in a very proprietary way which makes it difficult to manage your photos if you ever want to move from iPhoto (which you will, I guarantee).

Try Google’s Picasa. I was delighted with it on my pre-Apple Windows XP PC and so far it looks as good on a Mac. It is not quite as pretty as iPhoto, but I’d argue it is easier to use. You have to import your photos to the Mac but then Picasa can be used to automatically import pics from wherever you have saved them. Much more flexible than the iPhoto way which, you may have noticed, makes it nigh on impossible to effectively manage and edit a shared picture library that spans multiple user accounts. Picasa’s facial recognition is also MUCH better/accurate.

Apple make superb hardware but the others (e.g. Google) have caught up and promptly overtaken them with the software.

I have problems with Safari- in particular the process ‘Safari Web Content’ which seems to leak memory, as does ‘Safari’. A days browsing can eat up a couple of gig of memory quite easily.
Have a look at the activity monitor when safari starts bogging down- I need to close the application, not just tabs or windows, to free up memory.

he now posts from google chrome, which i am much more at ease with

defydude, i think the problem may have actually been more the batching files into one pdf now i have been back and had a hunt around. For my c.v. i have been creating pages on photoshop and creating .jpg files from there then i want all those into one pdf.

tortoise, thankyou i shall give that a go!

PICNIC.

a couple of things:

download and run applejack. do not be freaked by the matrix looking garbage that will appear on your screen while it does it’s thing.

run applejack after every program install or update or if you think your mac is slowing down a bit.

if you delete anything from external media then always empty the trash before ejecting.

defydude, i think the problem may have actually been more the batching files into one pdf now i have been back and had a hunt around. For my c.v. i have been creating pages on photoshop and creating .jpg files from there then i want all those into one pdf.

Go to the folder that contains all the jpgs, then:

1 > CMD+A to select all

2 > CMD+O to open all

3 > All jpegs should now be open in Preview

4 > Select all the images in the left hand pane (with the mouse or CMD + A again)

5 > CMD + P or File > Print

6 > Select PDF:

7 > Name it and hit save. You should now have all jpgs in one pdf.

also 4gb isn’t a lot of ram, 8gb is cheap and easy to fit, 16gb is ‘affordable’ if you are a power user.

defydude many thanks! that is ace help, i will get that done later 🙂

mrsmith – i have thought about upgrading but i only just bought it and i am out of the country until may where there is very little mac support. once i am living back in the country i will definately upgrade as having read how to do it it seems verry simple, i have done it before on my dell which was ridiculously easy.

anyone use iboostup? if so any good or is it just some crappy gimmick?

I just don’t see why a relatively new MB would be running slow. Have you checked in Activity Monitor (applications > utilities > activity monitor) to see what your memory/CPU usage is saying?

I just don’t see why a relatively new MB would be running slow.

it’s because you usually have a lot of updates to do to the OS as the supplied disk is a few months old plus any user added software.
that’s why you should run applejack to repair permissions (and other stuff)
it’s actually more of an essential for a newly set-up machine as a lot of the permissions are likely to be wrong.

i bet it will be running sweet as once it’s been done.

Last time I checked, Applejack had not been updated for Lion, with permission repair and several other features not working properly.

defydude – ok here is a print screen of what you just told me about, to me seems like a lot going on but maybe not and i wouldnt especially know what things can be removed or stopped, not on a mac anyway.
p.s. that took sooooo long because of the computer having several fits on the way!

so what is the deal with applejack? is it worth downloading if i have lion?

a link to the photos if they arent big enough to see the deatals on the forum…
https://picasaweb.google.com/104617169169641640405/February82012?authkey=Gv1sRgCK7lmfPSx7nBCw

evidently it doesn’t do permissions in lion but that’s easily done from disk utility.

Not a mac user (or a Mac fan) but it’s pretty obvious that Chrome is munching a lot of your RAM – Chrome runs each tab in a separate process, and by the looks of it some of those are flash/javascript/whatever heavy…

4GB of RAM will be plenty for what you need by the sounds of things.

You wouldn’t notice the difference with 8GB or 16GB.

Isn’t there a Mac repair utility, called Recovery Mode? Used to boot of CD, but with Lion I think it’s a separate partition?

(I don’t own Mac per-se, just a hackintosh 😉 10.6.8 on Dell Lattitude D520.)

I would reccomend ditching safari and running chrome, its a lot better, and faster.

Stilltortoise. iPhoto has wound me up endlessly with its terrible multiple user hassles. I’m about to go to a NAS for music, photos etc, I’ll give picasso a go…

Looking at the pics, everything seems to be running fine. Nothing seems to be hogging the CPU, all memory usage looks fine and memory allocation looks like you have enough to cope.

How old is the Macbook? If in warranty, and you have one nearby, I would be tempted to have a word with Apple.

it was bought in august last year, definately still in warranty and i bought it through the student offer so three years warranty i think, although theres lots of confusion over what you actually get with that anyway…

can you suggest anything else, ive signed up to a mac forum and asked on there however i fear it may be something similar to someone asking how much is it worth or a beginner mountain biker asking advice on here…we shall see

have you repaired permissions yet?
i wouldn’t take it to an applestore before doing a few things yourself.

update apps like safari and flash.
check there aren’t any start-up items that continue running but aren’t needed like u-sendit logins or 3rd party software updaters.
if it’s just one app then delete it’s preference file and restart or reinstall (dragging the pref file to the desktop will disable it, you can always trash it once you know you don’t need it)
repair the permissions.

if all this fails then back-up your user data and do a clean install from disk, run all updates before installing apps then repair permissions.

if that doesn’t work it’s borked and take it to a ‘genius’

right il google how to do all these things mr smith and see how i get one

For the record, if you want to see what is auto-starting on you MB:

Settings > Users & Groups > Login Items tab on the right

all i have is
moom
day one agent
drop box
SIMBL Agent

Really? I would have thought Adobe Application Manager would be auto-starting.

Also, what are you using SIMBL for? Usually for enabling Safari hacks, no? If you switch to Chrome, you can get rid of it…..assuming you are using it in conjunction with Safari of course.

Ignore the last bit for the time being.

i am not intentionally using simbl

currently performing repairs on permissions, i just went to disk utility, ‘verified disk permissions’ it found about 40 errors and now ‘reparing disk permissions’

i read a little about doing this and it seemed to suggest that any non apple or 3rd parts apps or programs would not be scanned in this? is that correct? im wondering if photoshop is the problem here and its a non legit version

If Photoshop was a pirate copy, you should still have to put in a serial number. Early CS/CS1 versions could be installed just by using a legacy serial number from a pre-Creative Suite copy, but later versions have to be verified directly by Adobe, like you have to do with Quark, and I don’t know of a way around it.
TBH, I really, truly, can’t understand just WTF you’re using Photoshop to create a CV! It makes no sense to me, a CV is just a text document that shouldn’t run to more than two sides of A4. You just need the free text editor App for that.
I also suggest that you go to Waterstone’s and get a couple of nice clear books on using a Mac with Lion installed.
I think most of your issues are to do with being totally unfamiliar with the OS, and you are perhaps being a bit ambitious in some of what you’re attempting.

I use Photoshop for large files, on a desktop and have been a user for several years. PS isn’t too processor heavy but it does hog memory, depending on the size of your file and how much editing you are doing to a file will influence this considerably. 4gb is not that much with regard to PS use, many users will run 8 or 16gig and a scratch disc, myself included. Also, depending on what iteration of PS you are running, earlier versions had a problem with clearing the cache, consequence being that it would write/read temp files to the HD, thus slowing the whole system. PS7 and CS1 particularly.
How is it when not running PS?
As for Safari, ditch it! I use Firefox as I hate it, and I am a very happy mac user in most respects.
Gari

and I don’t know of a way around it.

i do http://www.adobe.com/uk/

TBH, I really, truly, can’t understand just WTF you’re using Photoshop to create a CV! It makes no sense to me, a CV is just a text document that shouldn’t run to more than two sides of A4. You just need the free text editor App for that.

how unimaginative. If you haven’t got an infographic CV, you’re not trying hard enough:

My 2010 iMac (with 8GB RAM) is not happy running Adobe Lightroom at the same time as iPhoto. Sliders/adjustments have a small delay which is very irritating when developing images; sometimes, though rarely, it results in the spinning beachball. Quit iPhoto and it runs perfectly.

Some/most of these have probably been answered before, but I can type out quicker than I can read all of the above, so here goes… (P.S. Seasoned Mac user, and I sell and fix them as a day job)…

1. Most external devices used to come formatted as FAT32, which is readable by both Macs and Windows PC’s. But FAT32 limits a single file size to 4GB, so in this day and age of HD video and large file sizes, external drive makers have been switching back to NTFS (Windows format) and HFS+ (Mac format) separately, so not that many drives work on both these days out of the box unless you reformat them. Also, some external drives are shipping with USB3.0 compatibility these days, and Macs which don’t support USB3.0 can have trouble recognising a USB3.0 drive even though it should just work as USB2.0 speed anyway when plugged into a USB2.0 socket. It’s VERY odd that in this day and age, when both Apple and Microsoft have really worked together to make Macs more easily integrated into a traditional Windows based environment, it’s the external Hard Drive makers that are creating the problems right now!

2. Empty the recycle bin, when your external device is still connected.

3. I’ve been using Macs for about 6 years now, and recently just bought myself a brand new 13″ MacBook Pro with 2.7GHz i7 processor running 10.7 Lion. I’ve been on Mac since the early days of 10.4, and run everything inbetween too. I keep getting similar issues that you describe when I’ve got more than one application open, and I’ve done a bit of reading around this too. It seems that Lion is causing the problem, and even despite the recent 10.7.3 update, it’s still not all been fixed. I’ve always chosen to be a slow adopter of the newer OS before as I don’t like to do someone’s BETA testing, but given that I needed a new machine, it came with Lion on already, I went for it. Lion has some great features, but I still think there’s a few bugs that need ironing out. It’s only been on the market 6 months though, most OS’s take 12 months or more (Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever in my experience) to become fully stable and have all their bugs ironed out. But I’d agree that in 6 weeks of my new (Very powrerful!) new machine ownership, I’ve seen the spinning beachball more times than in the last 6 years together I’d say!

4. Maybe similar problem to above. I don’t use Safari though. Much as I like Apple, I’m not that much of a fan of Safari, and prefer both Mozilla Firefox (which I have had no issues with) and Google Chrome. Full Screen apps are nice, but do they really matter that much on a web browser? The only time I ever want full screen is for watching videos, and I can do that on youtube no bother anyway by hitting the full screen icon on there.

5. Annoying indeed, but as has been pointed out, easily fixed.

6. Easily done, when you select “Print” in Microsoft Word at least, you click the “PDF” option down the bottom of the window and away you go…

Here’s a great bit of software for you, that I suggest ANY Mac owner with new enough OS (older OS’s not supported I don’t think) downloads and runs. I have been using it for years on Windows machines, and quite frankly it’s superb, and now they’ve made it for Mac too…

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Stick with it though, I can guarantee that at the moment you’re just experiencing a blip, caused by both lack of familiarity with the OS, and also Apple not being quite up to speed getting Lion fully problem free just yet (IMO). Sooner than later though, you’ll really begin to appreciate how much nicer to use Mac OSX is than Windows, and what it can do for you.

Any more issues, feel free to drop me an email personally if you need a (reasonably) fast response…

macrumors.com has provided the answer to pretty much any question I’ve had about my Mac…… it’s a pretty friendly forum too

so this is what ive done so far
-ditched safari for google crhome, however some pages still sometimes just freeze, namely this website funnily enough!

-ditched iphoto for picasas own program, if anyone can recommend any others then fire away.

-run the disc utility to verify and repair any file permissions it found 40 errors and fixed them. will they all definately be fixed from doing that?

-run a disk error search on disc utility also, none were found

-fixed the automatic screen brightness adjustment

-sorted out my pdf problem but a new one has arisen, how on a mac can you reduce the file size, its a imagine heavy file therefore the file is coming out at 122mb however if i reduce the file size on the way i can find it reduces it to 600kb which is so bad you cant read the txt.

-i installed two updates that were available however i think this was just updating lion to 10.7.3 and restarted it properly which i dont often do.

thats possibly it for now.

I am using photoshop because i am an architecture student and my portfolio/c.v. is very graphic and to be honest in my opinion that is a very boring way of looking at it, i think if i was to do a c.v. applying for other types of jobs i would still make it more than just a black and white blether.

the laptop definately seems to be running better but im not 100% convinced yet, still lags on some things.

running it with photoshop closed before doing all these changes seemed to be making little difference to me.

MBOY
thankyou for taking the time to write that for me, i shall stick with it, i dont plan on selling up, however i am very temped by all these ultrabooks coming out! one question woudl be can you point me in the direction of a tutorial to set up time machine as i havent bothered to do that yet.