Helpful Hints for changing a lost administrative password and dealing with Super-Duper and more!

How’s the shopping going out there? I wouldn’t venture near the malls in Canoga Park/Woodland Hills right now. A lot of shoppers fiercely determined to get the best value and brooking no opposition. Besides, finding a parking place would be murder.

I did do some shopping from work on Black Friday. I bought the version of Office 2011 for the Mac with Outlook for Mac, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I got it for $9.95 and downloaded it when I got home from work.

Now if you think I’m dealing with some pirate outfit, no, no, that’s not the case. Microsoft has a Home Use Program, where employees of corporate customers can buy Office for either PC or Mac at this price. I took advantage of it to put Office 2010 on my PC and now it’s time for my Mac.

The best part? Microsoft allows you to have two installs from the downloaded installer. This means you could put the program on your kid’s computer, too.

The opening screen of the Home Use Web site shows Office 2010. Go under Other Products for Office 2011 for the Mac.

Now Office 2011 works on Intel Macs running at least 10.5.8 with 1 Gb of RAM and 2.5 GB of available hard drive space. Full system requirements here.

Now let’s suppose you went on eBay or Craigs List or got your brother-in-law’s old Mac. You got an Intel Mac at a good price. When it arrives, though, you need to change the administrative password. If you’re running 10.6 or less, Apple tells you to get a copy of the installation disk.

But you don’t have the installation disk the morning you exchange gifts.Your brother-in-law left town to party in Vegas. What do you do? Well, you follow the sage wisdom of Mac Yourself on how to change the administrative password without an installation disk. They’ve gathered how to do this for 10.4 through 10.8.

Finally, a tip from my own experience. I’ve used the cloning program Super-Duper! since OS X 10.3. I got it on the advice of Ken Gruberman and Elena-Beth Kaye. It works! But lately, I’ve had problems…

The problems occur due to conflicts between Super-Duper! and an anti-virus program I installed. I solved the problem by running Super-Duper! under Safe Boot mode. Safe Boot mode temporarily disables all those program that would otherwise automatically start when you boot up.

You get to Safe Boot mode by restarting your Mac, listening for the BONGG! sound and then immediately pressing the Shift key. I press the left Shift key myself. The Mac will then go through extra steps. Finally you arrive at the Safe Boot log-in screen.

This is the OS X 10.4 “Tiger” Safe Boot screen from my MacBook.

This is the Safe Boot screen from my Mac Mini running 10.8.2. Notice that the Safe Boot message is in Red and in the upper right-hand corner.

Boot into Safe Mode to run Super-Duper! When you finish backing up or cloning a hard drive, you can just restart the Mac from the Apple menu. You’ll return to full functionality.

See you at the December meeting Wednesday, December 5th, at 7:30 PM. You’ll find Holiday Goodies on the table and Holiday Apps demonstrated on screen.