Press the start button, click on Run, and type “cmd.” Press enter.

The shutdown flag allows you to shut down (or restart) either a local or remote machine. Used without parameters it merely logs the user off. However you can add…

-l : Logs off the current user, this is also the defualt. -m ComputerName takes precedence.

-s : Shuts down the local computer.

-r : Reboots after shutdown.

-a : Aborts shutdown. Ignores other parameters, except -l and ComputerName. You can only use -a during the time-out period.

-f : Forces running applications to close.

-m [\\ComputerName] : Specifies the computer that you want to shut down.

-t xx : Sets the timer for system shutdown in xx seconds. The default is 20 seconds.

-c “message“ : Specifies a message to be displayed in the Message area of the System Shutdown window. You can use a maximum of 127 characters. You must enclose the message in quotation marks.

-d [u][p]:xx:yy : Lists the reason code for the shutdown. The following table lists the different values.

For example, when you use the command window and type…

shutdown -s -f -t 3600

… it shuts down the machine (-s) while forcing applications to close (-f) in one hour (-t 3600).  Helpful for situations like the one I outlined above or when you are streaming a movie to an external monitor and don’t feel like getting out of bed after realizing “Jeez, even pirating Couples Retreat was a huge waste of time.”

I had tried to sync my GMail account once-upon-a-time, but decided it wasn’t worth the potential hassle. What hassle, I don’t remember– but in any event, I remember it was extremely easy to get it up and running using POP. However, this time around I decided IMAP was the way to go. Over the last few years I have slowly devolved into someone who uses GMail as my big e-mail cloud in the sky– that is, I want to be able to access an identical account (same inbox, sent, drafts, etc.) from anywhere (Macbook, PC, office, iPhone). IMAP should give me that ability.

Well, once I set up Mail to play nice with my Google account I noticed signficant slowdowns. I mean really, really slow. Like sending an e-mail that said “hello world!” took five minutes as the Apple pinwheel spun frantically. It seems like this a common occurrence with Mail 3.x and Leopard/Snow Leopard but there seem to be very few answers. I did end up finding one in the dusty corner of the internet.

It appears that Apple Mail has an issue with big attachments. I mean really big attachments. Like 20 MB big. Get rid of them, and it solves the problem. How do you do it? Well, there are two ways…

The easy way (tested by yours truly):

1.) Delete your IMAP account from within Mail by going to “Mail” -> “Preferences” and then clicking the little minus button below the account names. NOTE: I’m pretty sure this is foolproof with IMAP, but please, please make sure you are not deleting your e-mails from the server when you download them to your computer, because if you do that and then delete this account, well, you’ll lose your e-mails.

2.) Go into finder and delete the folder ~/Library/Mail/IMAP–/ or thereabouts.

3.) Go back into Mail, click on “Mail” -> “Preferences” and then the plus icon. Create your IMAP account as you did previously (make sure “create my account automatically” is unchecked or you will end up just creating a POP account with the default settings). This time, unclick “bring this account online” at the end of the creation process.

4.) Go back into “Mail” -> “Preferences,” click on your GMail – IMAP account, then click on the advanced tab. Uncheck “compact mailboxes automatically” and MOST IMPORTANTLY set the offline viewing preference to keep “all messages but omit attachments.”

5.) Set account to “online” and Mail will re-download all your e-mails; however e-mails and e-mails alone– no attachments. Everything should be running at Mach speed again.

Now, this way has one main drawback. You aren’t storing any attachments on your within Mail; if you want to download them, you have to do so as the e-mail comes in. This isn’t a problem for me, since I download the attachments I feel are important to whatever folder they are needed in by default and therefore don’t need another copy clogging up my inbox. However, if this is of crucial importance you can try the next step (at your own risk).

The hard way (I haven’t confirmed this works, but this would allow you to keep most attachments offline; only the ones over 20 MB are deleted– courtesy of bebopper):

1.) Quit Mail (Force quit if you have to)

2.) In Finder, click “Go” -> “Go to Folder.” Type the following folder path (replacing with your GMail User Name): ~/Library/Mail/IMAP–/.OfflineCache

3.) Look through the cached messages in this invisible folder and see if there is one or more larger than 20MB.

4.) Drag the offending large messages to the Desktop or Trash. Restart Mail, and Mail should stop hating you.

Both of these are essentially band-aids, so hopefully Apple will get its act together and figure out exactly what is going on. This seems to be a problem that has arisen in later incarnations of 10.5 and into 10.6, so it’s something that should be of pressing importance to the development team as we speak.

1.) The printer is automatically selected to “use printer offline.”
2.) Upon deselecting “use printer offline,” the print status of any documents in the queue is changed to “Error – printing” at which point anything in the queue will hang.
3.) The printer will reset itself to “use printer offline” upon power cycle or OS reboot, therefore leading to an endless cycle of 1, 2, and 3.

It turns out my issue was in the IOGEAR USB hub I use. I’m not sure if Windows 7 is having trouble dealing with the drivers (it was working in XP about a week ago) or the hub is just flat-out fried. Either way, I’ve seen a lot of threads on Google with the same problem but lack a resolution. Here’s one more thing to try, even if it’s a “well, duh.” If that doesn’t work, it can’t hurt to go with the always popular “reinstall the driver.”

Yeah. Thanks Microsoft. Here’s how to get around that.

Download oscdimg and then drop oscdimg.exe file into C:\Windows\System32.

Start -> Run -> type “cmd” to open a command window.

In the command window, type “oscdimg.exe -u2 -bC:\PATH\expandedSetup\boot\etfsboot.com -h C:\PATH\expandedSetup C:\PATH\Win7.iso” replacing C:\PATH\ with your actual path to the downloaded files.

You should now have an .iso file in that directory; burn a DVD using your favorite software (I used CDBurnerXP, but it’s old).

Restart and boot from the CD (specific to individual motherboards, my Biostar is F9, some are F8, some are the “Del” key). You should see something to the effect of “Press XX to select boot drive.” Press and select your DVD drive and follow the Windows 7 installation from there.

Thanks SIW2.

Unplug all peripherals except PS/2 mouse and keyboard.

Go into BIOS. Disable “USB controller.”

Remove/disable video card if you are bypassing the on-board graphics.

Boot the install disk.

Wait.

Wait.

Wait. (Seriously, like 15 minutes).

Follow install.

Reset everything back to “normal” following the installation. Apparently Windows 7 is having trouble with the drivers during installation, but does a reasonably good job downloading them afterwards.

We could not complete your iTunes Store request.
An unknown error occured (-4).

There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.

Apparently, Rich Hauck has the solution.

1. Quit iTunes
2. Navigate to System/Library/Extensions and delete AppleMobileDevice.kext (you may be prompted to enter your admin information)
3. Restart iTunes

Directions are also official via Apple Support.

There are two reasons I want to partition this drive. One, Time Machine has no feature that allows you to bound the size of the backups. Therefore, it will keep adding incremental backups without removing older data until it runs out of room on whatever drive you are using. Considering I only have a 160 GB hard drive in my Macbook; wasting 1 TB of space is pointless, and partitioning a portion of the free space for Time Machine allows it to be “bounded.” Secondly, by partitioning the drive with two file formats, I can easily attach the drive to my network (via Airport Extreme, for example) and have it be accessible from all my computers. Therefore, simple Windows backups using SyncBack can be done using the same disk as no-touch backups using Apple’s Time Machine.

So how do you set up two partitions on an external USB drive– one for Time Machine and one for using with a Windows box?

0.) NOTE: FORMATTING PORTIONS OF HARD DRIVES WITH DATA WILL ERASE SAID DATA. IF YOU ARE A NOVICE AND HAVE DATA ON AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE YOU WOULD LIKE TO PRESERVE, I WOULD RECOMMEND MOVING IT TO ANOTHER LOCATION OR USING A DIFFERENT HARD DRIVE FOR THIS TUTORIAL!

1.) Plug your USB external hard drive into your Mac.

2.) Open Apple’s “Disk Utility” — this can be found in the Utilities folders within the Applications directory.

3.) On the left hand side, you will see the hard drive you wish to partition — you will likely see the manufacturer name (HD, not necessarily enclosure) — match the manufacturer and size. Select this drive (the top level, not any sublevels within the drive).

4.) Select the “Partition” tab on the top of the right side of the utility window.

5.) In the “Partition” tab select the number of partitions that you want from the ‘Volume Scheme’ drop-down menu. If you are planning on using a two-partition scheme like me (one for Mac, one for Windows), select “2 partitions.”

6.) Select one of the partitions by clicking on one of the “boxes” underneath the dropdown menu. They will likely be named “Untitled X.” When a partition is selected it will be bounded by a blue border and you will notice that both “Name” and “Format” are available.

7.) Start with your Mac (in my case, Time Machine) partition. Select a name, size, and choose either Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for a partition that you will use with Time Machine or use as a boot volume. Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) if you wish to use this partition for Mac media or data storage.

8.) Select the other partition by clicking on it. For a Windows partition, select “FAT” from the drop-down menu.* The name is not case-sensitive (i.e., must be in all CAPS) and cannot contain spaces. I typically will name this “WINEXT” or “WDWIN.” Something short and sweet in case you need to browse to it through a shell.

9.) Select each additional partition (if any) and then name and set the format.

10.) Click “Apply.”

Voila! You now have a drive that Time Machine can use for Macbook backups, but you also have a partition for media/data file storage on your other boxes as well!

*NOTE: Some people have e-mailed and asked “why FAT? NTFS is more awesomer!” Well, I agree that NTFS is the better file standard; however, as of 10.6.1, OS X still did not have the capability to write to NTFS drives; so FAT is the preferred solution here because it would allow you to write/edit the secondary partition from your Mac if needed.

Immediately after updating, I noticed my Plantronics Bluetooth headset wasn’t connecting. I would put the headset into “discover” mode (this is typically done by holding down the power button on a given headset for anywhere between five and ten seconds) and would flip Bluetooth to ON (underneath Settings -> General). However, the phone would just stall, and would essentially time out trying to find the headset. One thing I soon noticed is that the little Bluetooth icon that used to be in the top right corner of the phone (next to the battery indicator) had gone missing. Problem.

My first order of business was to do a soft reset by powering the phone down and then back on. I hoped to trip whatever in the software was causing the phone’s internal Bluetooth chip to not activate. That didn’t work. I then did a hard reset (hold down power and home button for ten seconds and continue holding until the Apple logo appears). That didn’t work.

Finally, I stumbled upon a post in a dusty corner of the internet that told me to flick Airplane mode on and off a few times and try again. Well it seems unbelievable, but after flipping Airplane mode on and off once, the Bluetooth icon returned to my dock and I was able to pair easily.