Product Description

Degunking Your Mac, Tiger Edition, follows in the footsteps of the bestselling book, Degunking Your Mac. This new edition shows all Mac users the tried-and-true techniques they need to get the best use out of Apple’s latest operating system Tiger and keep their Macs clutter-free and running well. It explains how to get the best performance from the new features of Mac OS X Tiger, including Spotlight, Dashboard, Safari RSS, iChat AV, OS X Tiger Mail, Automator, VoiceOver, and many others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #598884 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-10
• Released on: 2005-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 396 pages

Review
"...provides essential tips and tricks to help every Mac user bring his computer up to top performance." -- Everymac.com, Book of the Month, July 2004

"...this is it, the book everyone should read that owns a Mac." -- Sid Pevear, Chico (CA) Macintosh Users Group

"I recommend this book for anyone using the Mac full time. The content is unique and the advice is practical." -- Jack Herrington, Amazon reviewer

"This modestly-priced book can help you get a lot more out of your Mac...nothing else quite like it!" -- Charles Moore, Applelinks.com

"What a great book!" -- Rachael Smithey, About.com Guide to Macs

A lot of useful tips and suggestions that will help you "degunk." -- Eric Wuehler, Amazon reviewer

Definitely check out Degunking Your Mac to make your Mac run faster and better than ever! -- Rachel Smithey, reviewer for Focus on Macs (5 star review)

Degunking Your Mac really can help you get a lot more out of your Mac for a better computing experience -- Charles Moore on Applelinks.com

If maintaining a Mac tends to be a bit mind-boggling, get this book and learn how to keep it squeaky-clean. -- MacCompanion.com, October 2004

This book will stay close to my Mac and will be referred to frequently! -- Alaskan Apple Users Group

From the Publisher
Degunking Your Mac, Tiger Edition, covers the latest operating system (OS X Tiger). Tiger has been greatly expanded, and the new features of this powerful operating system can help Mac users get better organized and reduce clutter. This revised edition of bestseller Degunking Your Mac takes readers inside Tiger and shows them step-by-step how to run Tiger at peak performance. This book is a huge time-saver because it's organized according to the proven 12-step degunking process that help Mac fans maximize the power and efficiency of their new OS. After streamlining their Macs, users can then focus on doing more creative things, such as making movies, recording music, using the Mac with the iPod, creating websites, and designing documents.

All of the crucial degunking tips and tricks and customization techniques are in this book, including how to better manage hard drives that slow down with media files, how to properly optimize the desktop, how to make programs run their best, how to keep fonts under control, how to manage all of the extra stuff that Tiger installs, how to best use the new security features, how to streamline repetitive tasks with Automator, and much more. There’s even a new chapter entirely devoted to your iPod! Special tips are provided to help users upgrading from earlier versions of OS X to Tiger. The book provides proven degunking maintenance tasks that users should perform on a regular basis to keep their Macs running at optimum levels. Mac users will love this book because it will help them stay organized, optimize their workspace, solve clutter problems, and keep their Macs running quickly and efficiently.

From the Author
• Shows how to get the best use out of Tiger’s new searching and file organizing features. • Features tips and techniques on installing and uninstalling programs quickly, and how to know which ones may be the biggest contributors to gunk build-up. • Provides hints on how to get the most from Dashboard, which houses a new application called widgets and provides access to the most commonly used features of iTunes, iCal, and Address Book. • Features the best techniques to degunk Mac OS X Tiger Mail and Spotlight--the new file indexing program--to get the results you want every time. Also covers Safari RSS, the new web browser for the Mac which now features RSS support. • Provides special degunking techniques for Mac users who download and use lots of multimedia files. • Features an entire chapter on degunking and managing fonts. Readers will learn which fonts they should have open when, how to get rid of fonts they don’t really need, and how to keep fonts from becoming a gunk magnet.

Customer Reviews

THE DEGUNKERS
The source of "gunk" is the way users use their Mac--not the machinery itself. But, a lot of Mac users don't think their machines have gunk. Author Joli Ballew has done an outstanding job of putting together a book that shows you how to keep your Mac running at tip-top speed as long as possible and to make you more productive along the way.

Ballew begins by helping you to determine whether your Mac is really gunked up. Next, the author introduces a proven 12-step program to degunking success--a program that can really and truly get your Mac performing like new again. Then, she explains how to get rid of- or degunking files that shouldn't be in your Mac. The author continues by showing you how to locate and get rid of unwanted applications, including beta applications, unnecessary programs and unnecessary Mac OS X applications. In addition, the author next covers Tiger's new Spotlight feature, including how you can use it to organize data and create Smart folders. She also focuses on getting you working more efficiently by personalizing what you access every day. The author next shows you how to degunk the Dashboard. Next, the author shows you how to degunk new features, so that they don't drive you crazy. Then, she shows you how to manage or eliminate your font gunk. Ballew continues with a discussion of how to degunk your iPod. Next, the author shows you how to prevent spam first, keep what you do get under control, and formulate a plan for reducing or eliminating spam altogether. Then, she covers e-mail housecleaning in more detail, and how to clean up and organize your legitimate mail with spam that gets through your defenses. In addition, Ballew continues by discussing how you can degunk the startup process and optimize the hard drive, so that your Mac runs as efficiently as possible. Next, she explores Software Update; as well as, available software upgrades. Then, she introduces you to the different types of hardware you can acquire to beef up your system. The author then shows you what tools are available to help you maintain your Mac and what tools can be used to search for, find, and fix errors with hard disks, permissions, and similar issues. She then shows you how important it is to secure your Mac and what built-in and third-party utilities and software are available to you. Next, she covers how to back up data, with emphasis on creating a backup strategy and sticking to it. Finally, she shows you how to get started with Automator.

With the preceding in mind, the author has done an excellent job of showing you how to follow the basic steps outlined in this book on a regular basis, with the results of giving yourself an insurance policy and saving yourself from encountering aggravation down the road. So, the belief here is that degunking your Mac will make your time on your computer more efficient, more productive, and maybe even more enjoyable.

Great for the non-technical Mac user
I reviewed a previous edition about a year ago. It was pretty good, but I thought some of the degunking advice/suggestions/techniques were a bit odd. I gave the book to a non-technical family member, who loved it. She passed it on to another family member who also loved it. I lost track of it after that.

So, looking at the book through a non-technical lens, this is a great book to help keep your Mac up and running smoothly. There is lots of good advice around the various features and applications you would normally use. For example; How to keep email spam to a minimum; How to find extra disk space if you're running low; How to keep the Dashboard cleaned up. This book also serves as a great way to explore and understand the various features provided by your Mac and the included applications. It also suggests quite a few 3rd party applications (free or relatively inexpensive) to assist you with the "degunking" tasks.

I guess to sum it up; this isn't exactly for the Slashdot crowd. However, if you're a new Mac user, a home user, or a non-technical user (i.e. no one politely refers to you as a computer geek) this should at least be on your "flip-through-it-at-the-book-store" list. For me, I will be sending it off to a family member. Based on prior experience, they're going to love it.

So much to degunk, so little time!
My new iBook G4 is already gunked up, so I am finding the book a treasure trove of help! The book's beginning pages I found long and redundant; I just wanted to get on with the degunking. The most important message for me at the start was to degunk in the order the book outlines. It has taught me much about what unnecessary items (for me) come loaded onto the Mac at purchase, i.e., foreign languages & fonts I can't use. As a long-time Mac user, I feel qualified to highly recommend the book for its orderly presentation, user friendliness and practical matters. In fact, I'll try to go through it again over time to see what else might have sneaked into my Mac.
M. Thoelecke