The Mac Admin's Blog

How to change the settings of the mouse 1. Go to System Preferences and open Keyboard & Mouse. 2. Select the tab that says Mouse.From here you can control mouse sensitivity as how fast the pointer moves across the monitor when you work or move the mouse, and adjust for your double-click reflexes. 3. If you want to control the speed of the mouse pointer across the screen when you move the mouse, you need to glide the Tracking Speed slider left which will slow it down or right to increase the speed. 4. In order to change the speed of a double click, move the slider 7 adjust to the level of your choice. 5. Now comes adjusting the scroll wheel (if you have it in your mouse) and this is also done in the same way, being controlled by the slider representing left to slow & right to fast. Mouse settings in Mac seems much easier in PC.

Enabling right click and coming back to control+click. In general, the mouse setting for a Mac mouse is made single click and for contextual menu it is ctrl+click. For the users switching from a Windows environment it is tough to work with one click and in general it is handy to work with one hand rather than using other hand to hold down control key. If we use the terms that Mac prefers, they call the single click button as Primary and the right click as Secondary button. In order to change it, follow these steps. a. Go to System Preferences and open Keyboard and Mouse. b. The selected drop down in blue is the option from where we can activate and deactivate the secondary button. We will talk about more settings of mouse in upcoming post.

How to control, disable and enable sound in Mac? Controlling sounds on Mac is really easy. The sound icon shows on the menu bar somewhere to the extreme right. This sound icon can be shown and hidden as per your choice. To increase and decrease the volume all you have to do is just click on the sound icon on the menu bar and then click on this sound icon and you will get the seek bar that allows you to adjust the volume. There are some further sound controls and to play with it all you need to do is, open System Preferences and click on Sound . Img 1 This will take you to a new window that controls sound on your machine. Img 2 Select the output tab (as in Img2) and to control the speakers, if there is any external speaker attached, you will see it listed here and in order to change the settings for this speaker just select it (and it will be highlighted blue) and control the settings. Img 3 If you want the volume bar not to be displayed in the menu bar then just check the option th

What is xampp and how to install it? XAMPP is a free and open source cross-platform web server package, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server , MySQL database , and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages . This was developed by Apache and the details are available here . Xampp helps you, if you are a web programmer or even designer and you want to test the developed site as how will it look exactly when it is launched on the web. Xampp makes your machine run as a web sever and host sites locally. Process to download and install Xampp on Mac Machines. Step 1: DownloadSimply click on the link below. This is the latest version. A complete list of downloads (older versions) is available at SourceForge . Download Xampp. (Download source: http://www.apachefriends.org ) Step 2: Open the .dmg file and the very first thing you need to do is move or drag xampp folder into you Applications folder. Step 3: Now in order to run this all you need

Disk Utility, Network preference pane, Console, Activity Monitor & System Profiler These are five pillars of troubleshooting a Mac machines. If you are facing any issue try to check if you could locate it and then try to resolve using these tools. A breif intoduction of each of the item is here and I will surely write details of each of them later in coming posts. 1. Disk Utility: Disk Utility , located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder, can perform two types of repairs via the following choices in the First Aid tab: a. Repair Disk b. Repair Disk permissions. While Repair Disk can correct a variety of directory problems, it is generally incapable of repairing severe directory corruption for which you can try few third party applications, but before you try them, assure that you have the latest version of the utility that is compatible with the version of Mac OS X you are using. Repair Disk Permissions verifies and, if problems are found, resets (repairs)

Short Intro About Leopard Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Apple's next operating system after Tiger i.e. 10.4 that was launched more than two years ago. Apple claims that there are more than 300 differences on Tiger and Leopard, while not earth-shattering, further streamline the experience of using a Mac . Now the very next question comes to your mind would be, "Is Leopard worth paying what Apple has set his price to?" For some of you it maybe not, because you are contented with the way Tiger works for you. If you are looking for Time Machine , you need a Leopard, if you need Bootcamp, even then you must have Leopard. Leopard makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista . The recently launched Spotlight is just impressing. Leopard's interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat (See our photo gallery of screenshots .) Mac OS X

Unable to find incoming mails in inbox I got a user who faced the issue that whenever someone sends her a mail she could not find it in her inbox. She checked the details and sent mails to herself but was unable to find it there. The main issue was that she had exchange account configured in her Entourage and could see the mail in her webmail but as soon as she launched her Entourage the mail disappeared. It did not take long to understand that this problem is just because she had a rule set up which was causing all the mails which were coming in the inbox were automatically getting deleted. So just deleting the rules fixed her problem. If we move a step ahead there could be some other reason which could cause this happen. The other reason could be MLM, Mailing List Manager. If a rule is set up under MLM you will not be able to get your mails and will take effect as soon as Entourage is launched. So if you face any wiered issue please don't forget to check the MLM & Rules. For

Mail lost after clicking on 'Send' This happens in Entourage that when you click on send and mail is not send and is lost. This happens when the database is corrupt and needs a rebuild. If in case you will try to find this particular mail, you wont be able to, in your inbox or other folders under the account. It always sits in the "Outbox" of your "On My Computer" folder. Now in order to fix the problem of 4363 and 4362 you need to click here .

Finding all mails & items related to one contact Here is the simple step that we can follow to find out all mails and other items related to a contact. Launch Entourage and click on Address Book . In your address book, select a contact of whom you want to check the details about. Click on Contact & go to Find Related Items . You will find that all mail related to this contact appears in a new window. Here it is... the list of all the items related to this contact.

Add a picture to a contact Adding a picture gives a personal touch to the contacts saved in your book and lets you easily identify who sent the e-mail to you. When you receive a message from a contact with a photo, their picture appears in the preview pane. You can add a picture to any contact in the Entourage Address Book. Here is the procedure to add a picture in an Address book: Click Address Book . In your address book, double-click a contact. On the Personal tab, drag a picture to the box labeled Drag and drop image here . Tip To remove a picture from a contact, drag the picture to the Mac OS X trash. Close and save the contact. Notice that the picture appears in the contact's address book record.

Entourage crashing due to corrupt database In this case we need to rebuild database of Entourage . SHORTCUT TO LAUNCH REBUILD DATABASE: Hold the Option key while launching Entourage. a. The other option to rebuild the database is to first close all the Microsoft applications. b. Launch Applications (Command+shift+A). c. Go to 'Microsoft Office 2004' then 'Office' and then open ' Database Utility '. d. Select Rebuild Database & click on Continue. e. If there is any MS office program running, it will give you a prompt to close it down. f. Once the rebuild process is complete, click on Done. g. Entourage will bring you back to the same window, this time click on Quit. Once this process is complete relaunch Entourage. For the very first time your Entourage might take long time depending on the size of your folders and database. Other reasons could be Fonts , Schedules , Duplicate daemons .

Entourage crashing due to corrupted Schedules Sometimes you try to open Entourage and it crashes at soon as it is launched. In this case though there could be various reasons one of them is "Schedule" that could create the problem. To fix this we need to stop schedules at the time of launching Entourage. Hold down "Shift" key and launch the application and this will stop schedules from launching, if by doing this the application is not crashing that means issue is with schedules and you need to find and delete the schedule that is creating Entourage to crash. Other discussed reasons are database , fonts and duplicate daemons .

Entourage Crashing due to Fonts There are two fonts that are known to be one of the most popular reasons of Entourage crashing. The first one is Helvetica Fractions which is majorly responsible to cause problems, the second is Times Phonetic. In order to fix this issue, don't just disable these fonts in Font Book, but physically remove them from your system and try to launch Entourage again. Other discussed reasons are database , schedules and duplicate daemons .

Entourage is crashes when trying to launch. One of the recently tested reasons is duplicate daemons . To launch an application there is a daemon in start up items. if there are multiple daemons for the same application then they could create conflict and stop Entourage from launching. The fix to this is to delete all the daemons from start up and launch Entourage , once launched, it will create its own daemon. There could be some other reasons like fonts , database and schedules .

Entourage responding too slow Too many mails in your inbox. How it impacts: Every time when send & receive runs on your machine, it takes time to sync depending on number of mails on the exchange server. Fix: You need to move mails from your exchange/POP/IMAP account to your computer folder. Process: In order to fix this follow the following steps: a. Launch Entourage. b. Select the mails that you want to move from exchange to your computer. You can use command key to select multiple items. c. Now drag those folders to "On My Computer" folder in Entourage . d. If you want to add sub folders under "On My Computer", just use contextual menu on this folder. Just like the mails you can also copy the whole inbox in "On My Computer" folder. Please Note: Once you move those mails from your inbox, it is moved from the server so you will not be able to check those mails from anywhere else, i.e. from any other machine. Other useful steps could be Archiving

After Rebuild Entourage starts resending old mails Working at a help desk we use to get this issue that sometimes after rebuilding database Entourage starts sending old mails (upto one year old) to the users added in the contact list. Though it took really long time but finally we reached to the conclusion, "The reason is not that rebuild is unsuccessful but it is due to the duplicate identity that is created while creating the database." This duplicate identity is selected in the place of main identity in Entourage and all you need to do is just change it to the default original identity what it should be and it will stop sending the mails.

Partial mail vanishes while composing This seems to be, though it is actually not a problem. MS office has enabled Entourage with a feature that allows the user to highlight a portion of the original message and then when you forward or reply, it only brings that part that's highlighted into the new message. In order to fix this all you have to do is don't highlight anything in the original message and it will all appear in the new message or otherwise if you want, you can use this feature here onwards. marketing

Fonts not to be deleted in Entourage As we all know that there are certain fonts that are required in order to run each application. Microsoft Office 2004 is exactly same, at the time of installation it creates a folder and keeps all the fonts in it. They are 77 in numbers and are placed in the following folder: Home/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Fonts Note : There are several other font folders the system calls on in addition to the user's font folder. For more on OS X and the font folder hierarchy, see this Apple Knowledge Base article . Fonts in OS X are complex. You need to understand how they work before experimenting with them (and in any case, leave the System font folder – Harddrive/System/Library/Fonts – alone!). Source As this applications install fonts, without regard to yoy already have on your Mac(not to speak o

The very Basic Entourage troubleshooting. 1. The very first thing you need to make sure of, is you need to be updated. Not just OS X but also your MS Office suite. Most of the problems are solved by simply keeping the machine updated. Make sure you are using the latest versions for the OS and Microsoft Office. 2. Sometimes just a normal rebooting of your Mac is required. This often fixes many problems. 3. Running Repair Permissions is another standard tool used to repair problems, but it is more effective with the inbuilt OS X applications. 4. The very first recommended step is to delete cache files which is effective many times. 5. Finally you have the option to delete the plist i.e. deleting the preferences files. Doing this the application changes all the settings to default hence solving the issue if it was due to any changes made.

marketing How to manage the delegatory access? 1. Open Entourage and click on Mail icon. 2. On the left side in the folder list, select Calendar, Address book, inbox folder that you want to change access for. 3. Now come on Edit menu, select Folder Properties & then click the tab that says Permissions . 4. Select the user (ofcourse name) whom you want to change the permissions for. 5. Here you will find Permission Level pop-up, define the access level that you want to grant this user. If you want to know details of delegatory access and study other troubleshooting steps please refer Mactopia .

How to remove a delegate from Entourage? 1. Launch Entourage and on the Tools menu, click on Accounts and select the Mail tab. 2. Open the Microsoft Exchange account that you want to delete/remove a delegate from. 3. Come on Delegate tab, in My Delegates , select the delegate that you want to remove, and then click Remove . It was really simple, isn't it?

Adding a Deligate (Only for Exchange users) 1. Launch Entourage go to Tools and then Accounts . 2. Open the account that you want to create the delegate for, then select the Delegate tab. 3. Go to My Delegates and select Add. 4. Type the name of the user whom you want to give access to, and try to resolve the name by clicking Find . 5. Select the user and click OK . 6. Now define the permission levels that you want to give to that delegate from Calender, Address book and Inbox. Note: Before you give access to anyone the user has to add you under Users I am Delegate for .

How to set up Live Hotmail account in Entourage One of the best feature provided by Windows is to configure Live Hotmail accounts in any mail client and if you own a Mac, luckily you too can do it. Note: Make sure that all the Live mail accounts have to be configured as POP3 account and the steps are mentioned below. Even if you want to make it easier we can not help you as it is not possible to follow setup assistant.Apart from Setting the account up, there are some other steps that needs to be followed, i.e. a scheduler needs to be created as the mails should be sent and received at an interval of not less than 20 minutes as there can be duplicate mails coming in your inbox. Configuring the account: 1. Before we start configuring the account, just login to your Live Hotmail ID using your browser and then just logoff. 2. Now lets start with Entourage, on the Entourage menu, goto Account Settings . 3. Click the arrow after New , and then hit Mail . 4. Now if you get Account Set

How to stop Entourage from opening multiple windows automatically One of my user reported an issue that whenever Entourage wakes up from sleep mode, it opens multiple windows. This took really long till I understood the way to fix this. If it happens to you, all you have to do is export the data and then import it in a new identity. Once its done you can delete the old identity, but make sure no data is left in the old identity. The process to export is well explained here .