*Open Source Typical Mac User Live **

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Welcome to the Typical Mac User Live show. My name is Victor Cajiao and I am your host this evening. My regular Podcast Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights.

If you are listening to the Talkshoe stream and want to be an interactive part of the show. All you have to do is sign up for Talkshoe at www.talkshoe.com (It's free) and get an ID

The you can Call Phone Number: (724) 444-7444
Talkcast ID: 3097 you will be asked top put in your talkcast ID and then you can put in the number you choose for your talkcast ID.

If it's the first Sunday in June it must be time for Mac Maintenance Sunday with my co-host Steve Stanger who is the host of the Mac Attack Podcast http://themacattack.us/ and also part of the crew over at the Mac roundtable podcast http://macroundtable.com/. Steve welcome back to our third Mac Maintenance Sunday.
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Steve one quick listener question before we start. Listener Rickey Larkin wants to know the following.
*Can anyone sign up to take an Apple certification test? And
how long approximately will it be before they update the test to the new
Leopard?

The Apple Training site http://train.apple.com/certification/macosx.html

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Let's talk upgrades

Not so Techie:

• Memory - Fairly easy to upgrade on most Macs, Mac Mini is a little tricky but can be done. Most big memory sellers should have a memory configuration tool on their website that allows you to select your computer, then it shows you the memory options you have and what memory you should purchase for your particular Mac. Many online memory vendors offer installation guides or you can search Apple's knowledge base or check you manual (or if none of those are good enough I have a link that lists installation guides).

BEWARE of no name, super unbelievably low prices on Memory from some of the big catalog and online vendors. This cheap RAM is usually subpar and will make your Mac do bad things.

Techie:

• Hard Drives - Pretty easy on Mac Pro's, G5 and G4 towers, 3 screws on a MacBook. On other portable Macs this crosses into the "Very Techie" rating because it requires you to take apart your Mac.

(Specifically can we talk about how I would go about upgrading my boot drive on my mac pro to a Barracuda Drive. currently it has a 250 regular 7200 SATA. So can we use this an example of what I would do to pick the drive, to move the data in preparation, to install the drive, then how do I boot the machine and get it so that it's the new boot drive.)

• Processor Upgrades - Doing processor upgrades spans the range of techie to Very techie depending on what computer you're upgrading. Processor upgrades that I have found are for G3 & G4 towers and beige G3's to faster PPC chips, iMac slot loading (this upgrade replaces the entire LB), G3 Pismo PowerBook (firewire) to G4, G4 Cube to fast processor.

Very Techie:

• Wireless cards - upgrading to "N" card (for non N MacBooks & MacBook Pros). I have gotten a lot of emails about this

• Combo drive to a super drive (or faster super drive/ dual-double layer drive/ blu-ray) - on your portable it's brain surgery. On desktop systems "Not so Techie".

Some notebook "upgrade vendors" do offer a mail in service where they will do the "Very Techie" upgrades for you for a charge, of course.

Links

• take apart guides - http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/

• memory installation guides - http://www.ramjet.com/installation.asp

• memory vendors - http://www.kingston.com/, http://www.ramjet.com/, http://www.crucial.com/

• parts and upgrade venders - http://www.mcetech.com/index.html, http://www.powerbookmedic.com/ (for older Apple notebooks), http://fastmac.com/, OWC - http://www.macsales.com/

http://www.macrestore.com, not sure if they do upgrades

External iTunes Library

Apple does has a somewhat convoluted Knowledge Base article on how to do this. This is the easy way...

Navigate to your home folder, get into your music folder. You should see at least four files and folders. two of each to be more exact.

• Album Artwork folder

• iTunes Library

• iTunes Music folder (songs, podcasts, movies, and games)

• iTunes Music Library.xml

Out of these four we are just going to move the iTunes music folder

1 - Quit iTunes if it's running

2 - Copy the iTunes music folder to your external drive.

3 - Tell iTunes where your music library is:

iTunes' Preferences > click on Advanced > click on the General tab.

Click the 'Change...' button and select the new location of your music folder. Just navigate your system using the finder dialog box and select the music folder in it's new location. Click the Choose button to finish. Any settings you had before like "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" or "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to Library" will still be active.

As long as your external drive is mounted you can play your music,videos and podcasts.

That's it. You can now delete your old iTunes music library after you have checked that everything is working right.

An easy fix to a problem you may run into:

If you happen to import music, download a podcast, or buy music or iPod games from the iTunes store when the external drive is not mounted or connected.... (Give an example)

iTunes will recreate a new local iTunes music folder to save all that stuff in.

This is where the Consolidate Library comes into play. (Advanced menu > Consolidate Library).

This command tells iTunes to copy anything you have imported to the local default music folder over to your external folder

NOTE: You can also move your iTunes music folder to the shared folder on your Mac (it's in the Users folder at the root of your drive). This will allow all users of the computer to share the same music folder.

Let's take the listener Question

WWDC Rummors

• We can't do a June show without having all of you let us know what your predictons are for WWDC and the iPhone release date.

SHOW ENDING:

Well I want to thank Steve Stanger from the Mac Attack Podcast http://themacattack.us/ for being with ust tonight. You absolutely want to subscribe to his podcast and listen to each episode and some of the past ones. I sure do.

The Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights. This show will be release in my sream late tonight. If you haven't subscribed to that show yet, head over to the web site at www.typicalmacuser.com and hit the ONE BUTTON iTunes subscription.

For now this is your Host Victor Cajiao saying, enjoy the rest of your Sunday