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How to check the health of your hard drive

Written by Philip Roy
Most disk drives include S.M.A.R.T. hardware developed by IBM that allows hard disks to test themselves for potential problems. You can check the health of your hard disk in Disk Utility, located in Applications/Utilities.

To check the status of a disk, go into your Applications folder, into the Utilities folder and double-click on the Disk Utility application. Click on your hard drive disk in the left-hand column (make sure you click on the disk name and not a partition). Look at the bottom of the window to see the S.M.A.R.T. status (as shown in the example below).

If your disk is "verified," it's a valid disk with nothing wrong at this time. If you see "About to Fail" in red letters, back up your disk immediately and have the disk replaced. It will fail.

Taken from this page at Apple that includes more information.

Last Updated Monday, 10 March 2008

Zooming the screen on a flat-panel Mac

Written by Philip Roy
Pretend your pokey 15-inch flat screen is really 22-inches or bigger. If you have Jaguar OS 10.2 or above you can. Press this combination of keys: 'cmd (apple key) & option & 8' to access this ability. Now you can zoom in on your screen using 'cmd & opt & +' keys, and zoom back out using 'cmd & op & -'
Last Updated Tuesday, 30 November 1999

Getting audio from an MPG file

Written by Philip Roy
If you ever wondered how to decode the audio part of a .MPG file, here's one method:

• Try to open the movie with iTunes
• Select the file in your iTunes library.
• Choose Advanced -> Convert selection to AIFF or Advanced -> Convert selection to MP3
• What iTunes actually displays in the menu depends on your selection in Preferences -> Importing.
• After converting, you can import this audio file into your preferred video application.

Don't forget to delete the file from your iTunes library if you don't intend to use it again in iTunes.
Last Updated Tuesday, 30 November 1999