Recommended | Note: Amazon offers new & used products from many dealers. New products ordered directly from Amazon typically include free Super Saver shipping. If an Amazon page shows another dealer, click the "used & new" link to find an Amazon-direct page. Alsoft DiskWarrior 4 | When hard disk corruption occurs, your Mac may behave strangely (e.g., loooong pauses in Finder or Open/Close dialogs). In severe cases your Mac will refuse to startup. When Apple's Disk First Aid (a feature of the Disk Utility) fails to fix a corrupted disk, turn to DiskWarrior. Have it on hand before problems arise. Alsoft's DiskWarrior 4 is the disk repair champion. | | Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" (10.6) | Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" adds incremental enhancements to Leopard: faster Finder and Time Machine, slicker Exposé and QuickTime X, and more. Snow Leopard requires a Mac with an Intel processor, 1 GB of RAM, and Leopard (10.5). Compatible Macs with an earlier Mac OS X release must purchase the Snow Leopard edition of the Mac Box Set: single Mac, Family Pack. Order the Family Pack if you're upgrading up to 5 Macs in the same household. | | | | | Mac OS X "Leopard" (10.5) | Mac OS X "Leopard" adds Time Machine ("A giant leap backward") and Spaces ("Room for everything"), as well as enhancements to Finder, Mail, iChat, .... Leopard requires a Mac with built-in Firewire and a G4†, G5 or Intel processor, which excludes older Macs like the eMac and original iMac. Order the Family Pack if you're upgrading up to 5 Macs in the same household. See also: Mac Box Set (Mac OS X, iLife & iWork) † G4/867 or faster | | | | | iLife '09 | iLife '09 includes enhanced versions of iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD and Garage Band, and iWeb. Order the Family Pack if you're putting iLife on up to 5 Macs in the same household. Click links at Amazon to see hidden prices. See also: Mac Box Set (Mac OS X, iLife & iWork), iPhoto '09: The Missing Manual | | | | | iWork '09 | iWork '09 includes enhanced versions of Numbers (spreadsheet) Pages (word processor) and Keynote (slide presentation a la PowerPoint)—an "Office" suite, the Mac way! All three work in great harmony with iLife applications. Plus they're compatible with MS Excel, MS Word and MS PowerPoint. Order the Family Pack if you're putting iWork on up to 5 Macs in the same household. Click links at Amazon to see hidden prices. See also: Mac Box Set (Mac OS X, iLife & iWork) | | | | | Mac Box Set | The Mac Box Set includes the latest releases of Mac OS X "Leopard", iLife '09 and iWork '09 at a savings of 40%. Order the Family Pack if you're putting the Mac Box Set on up to 5 Macs in the same household. Click links at Amazon to see hidden prices. | | | | | MobileMe | MobileMe is Apple's offering of on-line services (email, Web site hosting, file storage) that expand the capabilities of your desktop applications (Mail, Address Book, iCal, iWeb and OmniFocus on a Mac; Outlook on a PC) plus your iPhone. MobileMe is "cloud computing" made easy. The Family Pack provides an individual account plus four Family Member accounts. Amazon's boxed MobileMe product can be used for a new 1-year account or a 1-year renewal at a considerable savings over Apple's price. | | | | | Beyond iPhoto: Pixelmator & Aperture 3 | When iPhoto's image editing features are not sufficient, iPhoto can launch an external image editor. Pixelmator is an excellent, low-cost image editing application for stand-alone editing or integrated with iPhoto. Although Apple created Aperture for professional photographers, it's ideal for serious amateurs who have reached the limits of iPhoto. Aperture 3 requires an Intel Mac. See the Aperture Technical Specs for detailed system requirements. See also: Apple Pro Training: Aperture 3 | | | | | | | FileMaker Pro 11 & FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced
Windows on Mac OS X Back in Mac's PowerPC days, Virtual PC provided an Intel PC emulator that enabled PC operating systems (mostly various releases of Windows) to run in a window on Mac OS X. Since the Power PC CPU was pretending to be an Intel CPU, performance of Virtual PC, even on the fastest Macs, gave new meaning to the computing adjective "glacial." With the advent of Macs with Intel Inside™, Windows "virtualization" became a practical solution for Mac users who needs to run Windows applications and the Windows environment at the same time as Mac OS X. (Apple's Boot Camp takes a different approach, allowing you to startup your Mac as a Windows PC or as a Mac, i.e., one or the other, but not both at the same time.) | VMware Fusion is the Windows virtualization solution I've chosen for my Mac. | | Nova Parallels Desktop for Mac was first to the Mac Intel market with Windows virtualization. | | Fusion or Parallels, running on Mac OS X, provides a platform for running an PC operating system (typically MS Windows XP or Windows 7) plus layered applications (e.g., QuickBooks for Windows). So, at a minimum, you need to add a copy of MS Windows to your shopping list. | Windows XP is the most popular choice for Windows on a Mac. The XP Home Edition is best choice for a single-user environment. Choose the XP Home Edition for System Builders (shown) if you're comfortable supporting yourself -or- the Full Version ($178.49) for support by Microsoft. Choose XP Professional if you need Remote Desktop, website hosting, encrypted files, multi-lingual interface, and other advanced features. | | Windows Vista Home Basic has been unpopular because it's considerably slower than Window XP on the same hardware. Choose the Vista Home Basic for System Builders (shown) if you're comfortable supporting yourself -or- the Full Version ($176.49) for support by Microsoft. | | Windows 7 Home Premium is the latest release, with better performance than Vista. Choose the OEM 32-bit Edition (shown) if you're comfortable supporting yourself -or- the Full Version (32/64-bit, $150) for support by Microsoft. | | |
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