May 15, 2012

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SAN FRANCISCO – [Editor's note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion.]

One of the premier troubleshooting features of Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) is Lion Recovery. If you ever have system or drive issues, Lion Recovery lets you boot your Mac into a special recovery mode to check or repair your hard drive, browse the Web for troubleshooting help, restore your drive from a backup, or even reinstall Lion itself. (See our hands-on with Lion Recovery for all the details.)

It’s a convenient feature that, in theory, means you no longer have to carry a Mac OS X Install disc or a bootable external hard drive. But as I explained when Lion debuted, there are still good reasons to have a bootable installer disc or drive. For example, if you want to install Lion on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire Lion installer to each computer.

But even for troubleshooting, a bootable installer drive has advantages over Lion Recovery. For starters, Lion Recovery doesn’t include the full Lion installer–it requires you to download nearly 4GB of data before you can reinstall Lion–whereas a bootable installer drive contains the entire Lion installer, making installation much, much faster. And if you’ve got a Mac that doesn’t support Lion Internet Recovery–a version of Lion Recovery based on special firmware–recovery mode may not even be available if your Mac’s drive itself is having problems, whereas a bootable install drive will always be there for you. (Lion Internet Recovery is available on mid-2011-or-later Macs, as well as some older Macs that have received recent firmware updates.)

The problem for newer Macs

When Lion debuted, I explained how to create a bootable Lion-installer drive from the Mac App Store version of Lion. But if you have a Mac that debuted after Lion (any Mac from July 2011 or later), your Mac shipped with Lion pre-installed. In other words, you don’t have a downloadable version of the installer unless you happened to purchase Lion for another, older Mac. Apple does offer a utility for creating an emergency Lion Recovery drive but, like the standard Lion Recovery feature, this drive requires you to download the full 4GB of Lion each time you want to install–it’s better to have the full installer on a bootable drive. (In our testing, the official OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive doesn’t work with Macs that shipped with Lion–it’s designed for installing the OS on pre-Lion Macs.)

The solution

Fortunately, it’s possible to create a bootable Lion installer even if your only Mac is a newer model, although doing so requires a bit more work.

Note: If you purchased Lion for another Mac, so you have a version of the Lion installer from the Mac App Store, you can use our original instructions for creating a bootable Lion-installer drive. As long as your downloaded installer is version 1.0.13 or later–select the installer in the Finder and use the Get Info command to check–there’s no need to perform the procedure below. Those simpler instructions will create a drive that works with all current Lion-compatible Macs. (You can also copy the Mac App Store version of the installer to your newer Mac, or download it–all 4GB of it–from the Mac App Store directly to that newer Mac, and then run the installer. But because these may not be options if your Mac is having problems, it’s still good to have a bootable installer drive.)

When you use Lion Internet Recovery to reinstall Lion, your Mac contacts Apple’s servers, identifies itself, and requests the appropriate Lion-install data. Apple’s servers verify the Mac model and then, assuming it’s a Mac compatible with Lion Internet Recovery, provide the roughly 4GB of data for download. Once that data has been downloaded, Lion Recovery restarts your Mac, immediately installs the OS, and then deletes the installer data. The trick is to interrupt that process–safely–so you can grab the installer data and keep it. Here are the steps to take:

1. Boot into recovery mode by holding down Command+R at startup; you’ll eventually see a Mac OS X Utilities window. (If this doesn’t work, restart and hold down Command+Option+R, which should force your Mac into Lion Internet Recovery.)

2. Connect a drive–a hard drive, a thumb drive, or the like–with at least 5GB (preferably 8GB) of free space. The drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and must have a GUID Partition Table. Follow Steps 1 through 4 in this slideshow to properly format the drive.

3. In the Mac OS X Utilities window, click Reinstall Mac OS X and click Continue.

4. On the Mac OS X Lion screen, click Continue. You’ll see the message, “To download and restore Mac OS X, your computer’s eligibility will be verified with Apple.” Click Continue, then click Agree (twice) on the next screen to agree to the Lion license agreement.

5. Select the drive onto which you want to install Lion. The important thing here is to select your external drive.

6. Click Install to begin the download. Depending on your Internet connection, the download can take anywhere from under an hour to several hours (or even, if you’re unfortunate enough to be on a very slow connection, considerably longer).

7. IMPORTANT: Monitor the download’s progress. As the progress bar gets near the end, get ready, because once the status reads About 0 seconds remaining, the progress bar will disappear, the installer will spend a minute or two cleaning up, and then your Mac will restart. As soon as the screen goes dark, unplug your external drive. If you wait too long, your Mac will boot into the Mac OS X installer on that drive, starting the installation process. Interrupting that process can leave your Mac unable to install OS X unless you restart it and–I’m not joking–zap PRAM.

8. Once your Mac has booted from its normal startup volume, reconnect the external drive. Alternatively, you can connect the drive to another Mac and proceed with the following steps using that Mac.

9. Open the external drive, and you’ll find a folder called Mac OS X Install Data. The important file is the one called InstallESD.dmg, just under 4GB in size, which is a bootable disk image containing the Lion installer. (If the Mac OS X Install Data folder has a “no access” icon, select the external drive in the Finder, choose File -> Get Info, and expand the Sharing & Permissions folder in the Info window. Click the padlock icon at the bottom of the window, provide an admin-level username and password, and then uncheck the box next to Ignore Ownership On This Volume.)

10. If you plan to use the same hard drive for your bootable installer drive that you used to download the installer, you’ll need to copy the InstallESD.dmg disk image to your Mac’s internal drive, or another drive, before proceeding. Use that copy in Step 12, below.

11. Launch Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities).

12. Drag the InstallESD.dmg disk image into Disk Utility’s left-hand sidebar.

Now you’ve got the latest Lion-installer disk image, and you’re ready to use that image to create a bootable installer drive or disc. As a bonus, the resulting Lion-installer drive should boot and support any current Lion-capable Mac. However, be aware that when Apple releases new Mac models, those models will come pre-installed with a newer version of Lion, so your installer drive won’t work with them. (At some point, Apple will update the Lion installer on the Mac App Store to support those newer Macs, so you can then download the updated installer and make an updated installer drive that supports even those Macs. And so on…)

The next steps depend on whether you want to create a bootable hard drive or flash drive, or a bootable DVD. I recommend a hard drive or flash drive; a DVD will work, but it will take a long time to boot and install. And, of course, depending on your particular Mac model–I’m looking at you, MacBook Air and recent Mac mini–you may not have an optical drive.

To create a bootable hard drive or flash drive

1. In Disk Utility, select InstallESD.dmg in the sidebar, then click the Restore button in the main part of the window.
2. Drag the InstallESD.dmg icon into the Source field on the right.
3. Connect to your Mac the hard drive or flash drive you want to use for your bootable Lion installer. As with the drive used to download the installer, this drive must be at least 5GB in size (an 8GB flash drive works well) and it must be formatted with a GUID Partition Table.
4. In Disk Utility, find this destination drive in the sidebar and then drag it into the Destination field on the right; if the destination drive has multiple partitions, just drag the partition you want to use as your bootable installer volume. Warning: The next step will erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure it doesn’t contain any valuable data.
5. Click Restore and, if prompted, enter an admin-level username and password.

To create a bootable DVD

1. In Disk Utility, select InstallESD.dmg in the sidebar

2. Click the Burn button in the toolbar.

3. When prompted, insert a blank DVD (a single-layer disc should work, although you can use a dual-layer disc instead), choose your burn options, and click Burn.

You can now boot any Lion-compatible Mac from this drive or DVD and install Lion. You can also use any of the Lion installer’s special recovery and restore features–in fact, when you boot from this drive or DVD, you’ll see the same Mac OS X Utilities screen you get when you boot into Lion Recovery.

(Thanks to reader Jameel Morrison for confirming this procedure and for prodding me to finally write this article.)

UPDATED 2/13/2012, 9:29am, to make it even more clear that this article is aimed at owners of Macs that shipped after Lion.

SAN FRANCISCO – The trite thing to do when writing about any software that can handle converting your speech into text is to do so using that software. I’m nothing if not trite, so that’s precisely what I’m trying to do here, with Vocal. Vocal is a new app from developer Matthew Roberts that leverages the power of voice transcription on your iPhone 4S to control your Mac. Vocal can take dictation and send the transcription to your Mac, and also perform a variety of other actions based on your voice commands.
For Vocal to work its magic, you need to install a free companion app on your Mac. Then, of course, you also need to pick up the $2 app from the App Store. Run the Mac app, and then launch the Vocal app on your iPhone. The iPhone needs to run on the same Wi-Fi network that your Mac is using. In theory, the app should list the name of your connected Mac; the app and Mac see each other via Bonjour. In my own testing, however, I needed to force restart Vocal on my iPhone by quitting the app, double tapping the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar, holding down on the app’s icon there, and then tapping the minus sign. Restarting the app after doing so allowed my Mac and the app to see each other.

At that point, I tapped on my Mac’s name within the app, and was then prompted to enter the passcode that Vocal displayed on my Mac’s screen. Once that was done, Vocal was ready to listen—and act.

Because it uses the systemwide dictation built into the iPhone 4S, Vocal doesn’t use Siri’s normal timeout. Siri cuts you off automatically as you dictate emails or texts if you pause for too long; the dictation option (triggered by tapping the microphone on the virtual keyboard) listens for much longer. That’s quite beneficial within Vocal, since it gives you more time to gather your thoughts as you compose sentences. (After a while, Vocal still does stop listening, but I believe that happens only at some mandatory timeout implemented systemwide when using the iPhone 4S’s dictation option, based on data or memory usage.)

Vocal puts the virtual keyboard on screen, even though you likely won’t need to type into the app. Instead, you just need access to the microphone key. Tap that and start speaking; tap the Done button when you’re finished. Vocal then acts upon your spoken instructions immediately; you don’t need an extra tap to submit your text.

That autosubmission when you’re finished speaking makes the process feel measurably faster. As soon as I finish speaking these sentences, I’ll tap the Done button, and Vocal will immediately paste this text into my text editor. (If the cursor isn’t positioned within a text entry field or document, Vocal still ensures that the transcribed text is copied to your Mac’s clipboard so that you can paste it manually.) Most of the time, that is. Sometimes, for reasons that I can’t quite understand, I still have to push the Send button manually within the Vocal app.

Now, handling transcription is only a small part of what Vocal’s claimed feature set is. The app is also meant to allow you to do things like control iTunes; send emails and tweets; look up definitions; select, copy, and paste text; search Amazon and Google; print; and create new documents. Some of those actions work brilliantly—when I said “Tweet the people at the Apple Store are generally very nice,” Vocal successfully opened a New Tweet window within the official Twitter client and pasted in my text.

Other controls are less full-featured. The iTunes controls, for example, require a bit more stilted speech than Siri can handle. I said, “Play ‘Artificial Heart,’” and Vocal simply started playing iTunes from its current song, ignoring my specific request. When I tried “Play the song ‘Artificial Heart,’” Vocal reported that it “couldn’t find a song in iTunes titled ‘Play the song artificial heart.’” “Play song ‘Artificial Heart’” felt more mechanical, but got the job done.

By default, Vocal attempts to automatically determine whether you’re speaking text to be transcribed, or instead sending instructions to your Mac. In practice, it works well—unless you try to start sentences with words like “tweet” or “pause.” That’s easy enough to work around, since you can turn the feature off if it’s not working right for you at the time.

Other instructions that worked great were vocal directions like “Define pugnacious,” which launched the Dictionary app to the right word; “Search Amazon for The City and The City”; or “Search Google for ‘chocolate baskets’.” Some actions, on the other hand, seemed hard to justify; I can’t imagine “Print this page” or “Open a new document” could ever save much time if you’re close enough to your Mac to see its screen.

If you simply tell Vocal, “Search for Great American Novel,” it’ll attempt to perform a Spotlight search. On my Mac, though, I’ve given Launchbar the Command-Space keyboard shortcut, and apparently that affects how Vocal works behind the scenes; the utility searched with Launchbar instead of Spotlight.

Vocal sorely needs a Siri-like info button that shows you all the commands it can handle. Right now, the Support tab at the developer’s Website is the easiest place to find available instructions.
In short, Vocal is definitely cool. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a cheaper way to get your Mac to take dictation. Its support for other actions is a mixed bag; some work well, some don’t. If nothing else, Vocal proves that Siri—natively—on the Mac could be nothing short of remarkable.

While it’s easier to manage a single Mac, it’s still possible to have control over multiple Macs within your home. Not only can you remotely configure parental controls on another computer, you can also monitor what your kids do with their Macs, limit the hours they have Internet access, and share media between the computers within your home.

Controlling parental controls remotely

You’re familiar with what you can do with a parental-controlled account. What you may not know is that once you’ve created such an account, you can change its options from another Mac.

When you first launch the Parental Controls system preference on a Mac you’re managing you see a Manage Parental Controls From Another Computer option. Enable this option and proceed to configure the parental controls for that account.

When you move to your Mac and launch Parental Controls, under the Other Computers heading within the Parental Controls window, you’ll spy the names of any Macs for which you’ve configured controlled accounts and enabled remote management. Click the Lock icon at the bottom of the window and enter your administrator’s password. Then select a computer whose controls you wish to configure. You’ll be prompted for an administrator’s name and password for that Mac (not for your own Mac). Enter each and click OK. All the controlled accounts on that remote Mac will appear. Select an account and you’ll find that you can adjust the account’s controls just as if you were sitting in front of that Mac. Additionally you can view that account’s log files.

The advantages of this remote control should be obvious. First, it allows you to modify a Mac’s limitations even when a pouting minor has locked himself in his room. And you can do it very remotely. While on the road you could, for example, screen share to your Mac using Back To My Mac, open Parental Controls on your home computer, and then adjust another Mac’s controls. This needn’t be to “punish” your child. You may need to allow a particular application or website so your kid can get her homework done.

Another operation you can perform remotely is approving the people your child communicates with. You can configure the People tab within Parental Controls so that whenever the user of the account attempts to send an email message or chat with someone not on the approved list, an email notification is sent to an account of your choosing. As long as you open that notification message with Apple’s Mail (it doesn’t work with other email clients) you can click an Always Allow button that then adds that address to the list of approved correspondents.

Keeping an eye out

If you and your child have separate Macs, you can watch his screen via OS X’s Screen Sharing feature. First, while sitting down in front of his Mac, log on to that Mac as an administrator and switch on Screen Sharing in the Sharing preference pane. In Allow Access For, select Only These Users, click on the plus-sign button, and choose Administrators.

To observe, go back to your Mac, open a Finder window, locate the Shared entry in the sidebar, and look for the Mac your child is using. Select it and click the Share Screen button.You can now see what he’s doing on his Mac–and even control it. Your child can try to cut you off (by choosing Disconnect, and then your Mac’s IP address, from the Screen Sharing menu in the menu bar), but your Mac will immediately reconnect.

Screen Sharing with a child can be a delicate matter. No one likes to be spied on, but it can help keep your kid on the up-and-up if he or she understands that you have the option, at any time, to see what they’re doing.

Limiting the Internet

Parental Controls can do only so much. While you can employ it to keep your kids from using the computer at all during certain hours, it can’t be configured to block only their Internet access. For this kind of thing you must turn to your router and limit access via MAC address (the unique identifier address that all computers and iOS devices have). It’s done this way with an AirPort Extreme Base Station:

Launch AirPort Utility, select your base station, and click the Manual Setup button. Select the AirPort tab at the top of the window and click the Access Control tab. From the MAC Address Access Control pop-up menu choose Timed Access. This is where you begin setting up limits.

Click the Plus button at the bottom of the pane, and in the sheet that appears enter the MAC address for the devices you want to limit (see “Blocking via MAC Address”). On an iOS device you’ll find this address by choosing Settings -> General -> About and locating the Wi-Fi Address Entry. On a Mac, hold down the Option key and select System Profiler (Snow Leopard) or System Information (Lion) from the Apple menu. When System Profiler appears, select Network and then in the Active Services column to the right, select the device used to connect to the Internet (AirPort or Ethernet). Search for the MAC Address entry in the results below.

Once you’ve entered the MAC Address, type in a description (Curt’s iPhone, for example). Now configure the pop-up menus below. Here you can choose limits of No Access, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Weekdays, and Weekends. Click the Plus (+) button in this sheet and you can add more entries–you can, for example, include two entries for each weekday. Click Done and update the AirPort Extreme and the router will block access except during those hours allowed.

Limiting online activities

Social networking sites such as Facebook are attractive for kids. It’s a place where they can establish an identity and hang out with their friends. But there’s the much-touted dark side: Kids often share too much, come in contact with strangers, and don’t know how to configure deliberately-opaque privacy settings.

Parental Controls can help by allowing you to completely block Facebook and similar sites, but that’s a tough call with older kids. This is one situation where your best bet is parental involvement. If you’re going to let your kids have a Facebook account (Facebook’s rules require that users be 13 or older to have an account), learn how to configure its privacy settings so the least amount of information is shared (this includes blocking photos that your child appears in). Demand that your child “friends” you on Facebook so that you can keep an eye on their wall. And, without scaring them, let them know why they should be careful about sharing.

You should also be very careful about providing a child with the means for spending money on the Internet. They should absolutely not have your credit card number or an iTunes ID tied to a credit card. If you want to allow your child to spend money on iTunes, set up an iTunes allowance within the iTunes Store or give them a gift card.

Sharing media between multiple Macs

Thanks to the file sharing capabilities built into OS X and Lion’s new AirDrop technology, it’s not difficult to move files between Macs on a local network. It is, however, trickier to create a single repository for music, video, and image files that can be shared between these same Macs.

Apple’s solution is the sharing options found in iTunes and iPhoto. To switch sharing on in iTunes, open the application’s preferences, click on the Sharing tab, and enable the Share My Library On My Local Network option (see “Legal Music Sharing”). Do this and you can choose to share your entire music library or just selected playlists. To share your iTunes library with iOS devices, choose Turn On Home Sharing in iTunes’ Advanced menu. When you do you’ll be prompted for your Apple ID and password. Your iTunes library will now be playable from an iOS device that is connected to your local network.

iPhoto has a similar sharing feature. From its preferences window, choose Sharing and enable both Look For Shared Photos and Share My Photos. Similar to iTunes, you can share all your photos or just select albums. Once you’ve switched on iPhoto sharing, others will be able to see your shared albums under iPhoto’s Shared heading on their Macs.

Apple’s solution doesn’t solve the central repository problem, however, as each Mac has its own iPhoto and iTunes library–the family’s collection of media isn’t located in just one place. There are options for making it available, however.

One option is to set up a Mac as a media server–a Mac mini, for example, or an older Mac you’re no longer using. When you want to add media to the family collection, you place it on this computer and then access that media via iTunes’ and iPhoto’s sharing areas. If a dedicated Mac is unavailable or too much for the family budget, you could obtain a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Many of today’s NAS devices include features for sharing an iTunes and iPhoto library. Simply attach the NAS to your network, copy your media to its drive, and access that media from iTunes and iPhoto much as you’d access any other shared media in these applications.

It’s also possible that you already own the means for sharing iTunes media over the network–a recent AirPort Extreme Base Station or Time Capsule. Start by copying media to a hard drive attached to your AirPort Extreme (or the Time Capsule’s internal hard drive). For each computer you want to share media with open iTunes’ preferences, choose the Advanced tab, and disable the Copy Files To iTunes Media Folder When Adding To Library option. Within iTunes choose File -> Add To Library and navigate to the folder on the drive shared from your base station or Time Capsule. iTunes will add the names of the audio and video files it finds to the Mac’s iTunes library without actually copying the files to each Mac. Each connected Mac will be able to play media within that folder and more than one Mac can play that folder’s media at the same time. (Playing different movies simultaneously on multiple Macs will be challenging unless you use a wired gigabit ethernet network.)

Backing it all up

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: It’s not a question of if your hard drive will die, but when. Each Mac in your home must be backed up if you care about your data. With Time Machine, individual Macs can be easily backed up to hard drives attached to those Macs. But that could mean purchasing multiple hard drives to outfit your herd of computers.

The better solution is this instance is a network backup–a scheme where each Mac is backed up to a single device. Apple’s Time Capsule was built with exactly this in mind. Available in capacities of 2TB and 3TB (priced at $299 and $499 respectively), a Time Capsule is an easy-to-set-up solution, though not ideal if you have a lot of data to back up.

Another, more flexible option is an old Mac configured as a backup server (perhaps the same one you’ll use to store and stream your iTunes content). With an old Mac you can not only add exactly as much storage as you need in the form of internal and external hard drives, but you can choose to use software other than Time Machine–a program such as Econ Technologies’ $40 ChronoSync, for example. When used in league with the $10 ChronoAgent on each Mac, backing up multiple computers to a single Mac is a relative snap.

Online backup is another option. Though slow-going due to the time it takes to upload a lot of data, storing your most important files online offers the protection of an off-site backup. Although each user can upload files to a service such as Dropbox or a MobileMe iDisk (at least until June 2012, when MobileMe and iDisk cease to exist), dedicated services such as CrashPlan provide automatic in-the-background backup and can provide plans that allow you to upload an unlimited amount of data from up to 10 computers for as little a $6 a month, depending on the plan you commit to.

It’s manageable

At one time managing multiple accounts or, worse yet, multiple computers took the patience of a saint and the smarts and experience of an IT professional. That’s no longer the case. While it’s not yet the kind of thing you can do with your eyes closed, with some familiarity with the Mac OS and the hints you now have in hand, you too can control a home full of Macs.

By Joseph Fieber
November 8, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Email providers such as Gmail and iCloud make it easy to store your old messages by the thousands, but finding one of those messages in your desktop email program is sometimes tricky. The Lion version of Apple Mail includes useful new search features, but also adds complexity and confusion to the process of finding messages. You can locate the messages you want, quickly and easily, by following some simple steps and learning a few pro tricks.

The easiest way to find something is to type one or more words in the Search box and see what shows up in the message list–you need not even press Return. By default, Mail looks for whatever you typed in the contents of all your messages. However, you can narrow down your searches in several ways.

Suggestions, tokens, and scope

The first thing you may notice is that as you type in the Search field, Mail displays a list of suggestions–things it guesses you might be searching for. You’re free to ignore these, but if you see what you’re searching for in this list, you can select it (with your mouse, or by pressing the arrow keys followed by Return) to quickly narrow the search.

Let Mail help For example, if you type a portion of someone’s name or email address, Mail may display the full name under a “People” heading. Select that name and Mail encapsulates it in a blue bubble it calls a search token, which enables you to read it or change its attributes more easily and with fewer errors than using old-fashioned search terms such as from:name@example.com. Similarly, if you type something resembling a date (such as October 2011 or yesterday,), Mail offers to create a token that matches messages from that date.

By default, tokens match your search term in message headers or metadata, such as To, From, Subject, Date, Status (for example, unread or flagged), Attachments, or a mailbox name–whichever seems the most likely match. If you want to search in a different location, click the arrow next to the token’s category and choose a different one from the pop-up menu. For example, if you select a person and the token says From:Dan Frakes, you can click From and change it to To. One of the options on this menu is always Entire Message, which expands the search to include the contents of messages, in addition to their headers and metadata.

Narrow your search Your search isn’t limited to just one token. If you use two or more in combination, Mail looks for messages that match all of them–for example: messages from a single sender about a particular topic (From:John Smith Subject:Curling); messages in a date range with some attribute (Date:January 2006 Status:Flagged); or unread messages with attachments containing a certain word (Status:Unread Attach.:grapefruit). Your search can also include plain text in addition to one or more tokens, allowing you to search for things like From:Dan Frakes, Date:Last Week, Subject:Mac gems, and utility all at once. If you change your mind about a part of your search, select it and press Delete.

Choose where to search In addition to determining which part(s) of a message to search, you can determine which mailbox(es) to search. As soon as you begin typing your search term, Mail displays additional options on the left of the Favorites bar (below the toolbar), which contains shortcuts to frequently accessed mailboxes.

The first option is All, meaning all mailboxes, in all accounts; that’s followed by either the name of the currently selected mailbox, if any, or Selected Mailboxes, if more than one mailbox is selected. So, to specify which mailboxes Mail should search, click All or one of the other options in the Favorites bar.

Be aware of Mail’s logic The suggestions Mail offers for creating search tokens depends on the search scope you choose. For example, if you’re searching for a person’s name, but your search currently includes only your Inbox and you don’t happen to have any email from that person in your Inbox, the name won’t be suggested as a token. But if you click All, suddenly Mail has a broader scope in which to search for the person’s name, and it’s much more likely to show up as a suggestion.

Mail tries to be clever when matching names. If I use From:Dan Frakes as my search token and my Address Book or Previous Recipients List has more than one address for Dan (say, a work and home address), Mail displays matches from any of those addresses. In fact, that’s true even if I expressly search for dfrakes@macworld.com–regardless of the fact that the search token shows a specific address, Mail actually returns messages from any of Dan’s addresses! (This may or may not be the behavior you want, but to avoid frustration, it’s best to be aware of how Mail works.)

Advanced search tips

Although simple searches can get you pretty far, you can perform more sophisticated searches if you know a few tips:

Take advantage of defaults If you choose All as the scope for a search, Mail defaults to All next time too. If you search in a single mailbox, Mail defaults to searching the selected mailbox next time.

Put phrases in quotes To search for a phrase, put it in quotation marks. A search for “apple pie” will find that entire phrase, but not messages with just “apple” or “pie” independently.

Adjust search terms according to scope When you search in headers (To, From, Subject, Date), Mail matches the strings you type anywhere in a word. For example, a search for cat matches “bobcat” as well as “catch.” However, when you search message contents using the Entire Message option, Mail matches only the beginnings of words–cat matches “catch” but not “scat.” This applies to multiple words, too: In a header, press ring will match a message whose subject is “exploring impressionism” whereas a search of message contents would only match if the message contains words beginning with both “press” and “ring.”

Try Boolean searches for message contents The Lion version of Mail now supports Boolean searches for message contents (though not for headers). You can use the terms AND, OR, and NOT, along with parentheses, to search for combinations of terms within a message body. For example, if the Search field says pineapple AND (peppers OR broccoli), Mail returns messages that contain the word “pineapple” along with either the word “peppers” or “broccoli” (or both)–omitting messages with “pineapple” but not one of the other words. Be sure to put the words AND, OR, and NOT in all caps so they’re not treated as ordinary words; you can use a hyphen (-), with no following space, as a shortcut for NOT, as in pineapple -eggs.

Specify date ranges You can search for messages from a range of dates as long as you enter the dates in the form “M/D/Y-M/D/Y” (as in 3/28/11-4/14/11). Ranges don’t create tokens, however, which means you must enter them carefully; a small typo can throw off everything.

You can’t search invisible headers Whether you search in headers or Entire Message, you can’t search headers that are ordinarily invisible (such as Content-Type, Message-ID, or Return-Path). That’s inconvenient when you want to look for messages sent by a certain email program, that have been processed by a server-based spam filter, or that have other special attributes that aren’t part of the message headers and body.

Save a search as a Smart Mailbox You can click the Save button below the Search field to save any search as a Smart Mailbox (Mailbox -> New Smart Mailbox), which then appears in Mail’s sidebar. This is a good idea when you have a search you perform frequently, especially if it’s a complex one. Smart mailboxes are updated dynamically as messages are added, deleted, and moved. To edit a smart mailbox, double-click it; you can modify it just as you would a Mail rule. (See “Use Mail’s smarts” for more information.)

FRAMINGHAM – This third installment of my series “Running Windows on a Mac” doesn’t focus on performance issues or what you can expect anymore, it’s all about how to get Windows 7 running on your Mac. And since Windows 8 Developer Preview was just released a few weeks ago, it made sense to include this as well to spare you the early adopter pains I had.

Running Windows on a Mac, part 1: Lion vs. Win7 performance shootout
Running Windows on a Mac, part 2): The good, the bad and the ugly

This guide helps you to…
- Create a Windows partition
- Download the necessary Boot Camp drivers
- Install Windows 7/8 from a DVD
- Install Windows 7/8 from a USB thumb drive and install rEFIt to boot from USB
- Deal with serious driver issues on Windows 8 Developer Preview
- Configure Windows and Boot Camp 4.0 properly
- Update the most common Mac drivers
- Enable AHCI
- Backup Mac OS X + Windows partition with one tool

Step 1: Setting up your Boot Camp partition

The first step requires you to shrink the Mac OS X volume and create a separate NTFS partition for Windows. I’ll describe these steps using Lion, though the procedure in Snow Leopard doesn’t differ a lot (except for the fact that Windows XP and Vista won’t work in Lion — yeah, Apple ditched “legacy” support entirely with Boot Camp 4 and Lion).

So how does this work? First, start Mac OS X Lion and head over to Go/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant. On a Mac with an optical drive, the first dialogue box gives you the option to download the “Windows support software” (i.e. Boot Camp 4.0, which includes all the necessary Windows drivers).

Macs without the Superdrive give you the additional choice of creating a bootable USB thumb drive from an ISO.

If you want to (or can) install Windows using your Setup-DVD, just pop it in and hit “Continue”.

If you’d rather install Windows using a USB thumb drive, read the steps below first and then move on. At any rate, make sure that “Download the Windows support software for this Mac” is checked, which starts a download assistant that puts the Boot Camp 4.0 drivers on your desktop, on a separate USB drive or burns it onto a blank CD/DVD.

On the next screen, you’re going to face a tough choice: How much disk space do you really need for each operating system?

Windows needs at least 20GB to work properly (system files, page file, hibernation file, system restore points, etc.). This is the absolute minimum. Depending on how much data you want to carry around with you and how many programs you need, you’ll likely need a lot more than that.

Choose the disk size wisely. Only a handful of disk partitioning tools are capable of handling both HFS and NTFS partitions reliably (I have personally tested Paragon CampTune, which works great, but there are a handful of alternatives).

Decided your size? Then let’s hit “Start Installation” and start the installer. Next, reboot your system and hold down the “option” key while doing so. Jump to Step 4!

Hint: Deleting the Mac OS X partition is a bad idea
I know some of you are playing with the idea of getting rid of Mac OS X entirely to save money and have a “clean” system (I get that a lot). I strongly advise against it. Mac OS X is literally the only way to get firmware updates for your Mac hardware (EFI, Bluetooth, SuperDrive, Wi-Fi, SSD, etc.) — in many cases, such updates have proven to be a live saver when it comes to performance and stability.

Step 2: Create a bootable Windows 7/8 USB thumb drive

Whether you’ve got a MacBook Air/Mini (2011) or any other Mac with an optical drive, installing Windows from a USB drive is just the more comfortable option: first, the setup is done in half the time, second, this thumb drive is also a more portable Windows Recovery Environment. It doesn’t scratch and fits easily into your travel bag — if your system gets messed up, plug it in and run the repair options. Here are a couple of ways to create a bootable key (remember, you’re going to need at least a 4GB stick):

Create a bootable Windows Setup USB using Boot Camp Assistant (MacBook Air/MacBook Mini only): Launch the Boot Camp Assistant, check “Create a Windows 7 install disk” and hit “Continue”.

Make sure that the proper USB drive is selected and hit “Continue”. Et Voilà! The ISO gets “burned” to a bootable Flash drive. Now, read the rest of the instructions given in Step 1 above (“Setting up your Boot Camp partition”).

Create a bootable Windows Setup USB using Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (All Macs): The easiest way to create a bootable Windows 7/8 Setup USB Drive is with Microsoft’s own “Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool“. Download it, select an ISO and the target USB drive — and you’re done!

(Hint: If the USB thumb drive isn’t recognized by your Mac bootloader or rEFIT, try creating the installer using USB Creator — and if all fails, the manual route should definitely work).

Create a bootable Windows Setup USB using Terminal commands (All Macs): If no PC is in visible range, the USB/DVD Download Tool won’t do you much good – in that case, you’ll have to work your way to the command line:

1. Open a Terminal window and run “diskutil list”. Determine which device node matches your USB thumb drive (e.g. this could be “/dev/disk4″).

2. Unmount this disk by typing in “diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX” (where X stands for the number of your USB drive — in our example, it would be “diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4″).

3. Type in “sudo dd if=/PATH/Windows7or8.iso of=/dev/diskX bs=1m”. Make sure to replace the “/PATH/Windows7or8.iso” with the correct path of your Windows 7 or 8 ISO file and, again, replace the X with the drive number.

4. Done! Once the operation is complete, run the “diskutil eject /dev/diskX” command to eject the flash drive!

Step 3: No USB boot? Install rEFIt!

Not all Macs support booting from a Windows-formatted USB thumb drive. So if you don’t see an image like the one to the right after plugging in your Windows USB key you’re going to need to equip your Mac with rEFIt, which enhances the standard EFI with a few options such as a terminal command line or our much-needed USB boot option. And it’s not as complicated as it sounds: Just head over to http://refit.sourceforge.net/ and get the 6.5 MB DMG file. Install rEFIt and restart your machine. Note: It might take a restart or two until the rEFIT option shows up, so be patient.

Step 4: The Windows 7/8 Setup

Once you’ve booted from USB or DVD, you’ve basically survived the most “difficult” part. I won’t bore you with the details of how to install Windows on your machine — it’s the same old procedure as ever. Both Windows 7 and Windows 8′s setup steps are fairly simple — just make sure to select the “Boot Camp” drive during setup and let it run its course.

Note for Windows 8 early adopters
The Intel HD 3000 Graphics on the 2011 MacBook Airs and Mac Minis have some problems with the built-in Windows 8 drivers; which makes the lower half of the display flicker and indistinguishable right from the setup. As you might imagine, that makes it kind of hard to work with or even finish the setup! The easiest solution is to plug in an external display, which shouldn’t be affected by the glitch. If that’s not an option, you need to use your mouse and/or touchpad to guess where to click next on the Windows 8 installer.

Once you’ve gotten past that small hurdle, download the latest Intel HD 3000 Graphics drivers for Windows 7 and unzip the file, because you’re going to need to do a bit of driver tinkering in order to get your graphics to work: Open up the subfolder “Graphics” and look out for the “igdlh.inf” (32-Bit) or “igdlh64.inf” (64-Bit) file. Open it and replace the line “no install on Win8″ with the entire paragraph you see under the line “[IntelGfx.NTamd64.6.0]“.

Save it! First, run the Boot Camp 4.0 driver installer in order to install all the basic drivers (see below for more) and then run the “setup.exe” found in the Intel drivers folder — if that fails, try running it using compatibility mode and with admin rights. This should make the Intel drivers install correctly and get rid of the annoying display bug!

Step 5: The 4 Most Important Settings for Running Windows on the Mac

After installing Windows, there are a couple of necessary (and optional) steps that make the Windows on a Mac experience just better:

Install Boot Camp: Without the boot camp driver, your Mac is next to unusable — Windows doesn’t provide drivers for most of your Mac’s hardware! Here’s how to fix that. Insert the Boot Camp 4.0 CD, DVD or USB drive that you downloaded earlier and simply run “Setup.msi”. Windows 8 users, again, need to perform some tinkering (which I describe below).

Done? Reboot! Now your Wi-Fi adapter, LAN, the graphics card, Bluetooth, the iSight camera, the sound chip and the trackpad should work properly.

Make Windows your default OS: You’re going full Mac on Win? Then let’s make Windows 7 or 8 the default operating system, so you don’t need to hold down the option key on your Mac to enter Windows: Right-click on the Boot Camp icon in your tray, select “Boot Camp Control Panel” and just click on “BOOTCAMP – Windows”. Hit “Apply”.

Enable Tap to Click: If you’re using a MacBook and just can’t stand to press down on the trackpad, just select “Tap to Click” from the Boot Camp options menu. To further improve the trackpad, go back to part 2 in this series and download Trackpad++!

Sound volume: Here’s a weird bug that I’ve encountered on literally ALL my Macs under Windows and that still persists on my latest purchase, the 2011 MacBook Air. By default, the sound volume of all movies (iTunes, DVD, AVI, MKV, etc.) is way too low — both coming from the speakers and the headphone jack. The solution: Go to “Control Panel”, click on “Hardware and Sound”, head over to “Sound” and right-click on your sound chip.

Jump to the “Enhancements” tab and check “Loudness Equalization”. As weird as it sounds, this actually boosts the volume of all your movies noticeably.

Note: Installing Boot Camp 4.0 on Windows 8
The latest Boot Camp drivers won’t work properly with the Windows Developer Preview, since the built-in OS check detects that you’re running Windows 8 (NT 6.2) instead of Windows 7 (NT 6.1) — the compatibility assistant is no solution. You are stuck with “Boot Camp requires that your computer is running Windows 7″!

Here’s the solution: First, download and install Microsoft’s ORCA MSI editor. Fire up Orca and use it to pen the “BootCamp.msi” (32-Bit) or the “BootCamp64.msi” (64-Bit) installer files, which are located under the “\Drivers\Apple” folder in your Boot Camp directory (make sure to create a backup of the original file, just in case).

Under the “Tables” section, you’ll find a category called “LaunchCondition.”

Right-click on this entry and select “Drop Table”. Save the MSI file and try to launch either the BootCamp.msi/Bootcamp64.msi or — if that doesn’t work — the setup.exe found in the root folder. This should get all your Boot Camp drivers installed!

Step 6: Update your drivers!

Since Apple uses standard hardware components (mostly), you won’t have a tough time finding suitable drivers, though some of them require a bit of searching and tinkering.

This is why I only recommend hunting down and downloading (and in some cases even modifying) drivers if you’ve got problems with games running unusually slow on your graphics card or when the Wi-Fi connection starts acting up.

The list of potential drivers for all the variety of Macs (Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini, iMac) goes on and on, so I’ll just compile the most popular here:

Intel chipset drivers: Basic chipset drivers which include the latest IDE/SATA/AHCI drivers, sound drivers and other enhancements.

Intel HD Graphics (onboard GPU) Drivers: These drivers are updated every couple of weeks, which quickly made the Boot Camp 4.0′s drivers (dated early 2011) obsolete.

NVIDIA GeForce (discrete) Graphics Drivers: It’s likely that the official NVIDIA drivers won’t work on your NVIDIA-based Macs (though it’s worth a try), so you will likely have to resort to a bit of driver modification to get the latest drivers to work. It sounds worse than it actually is. Simply head over to the LaptopVideo2Go forums and choose the latest GeForce driver series category.

These forums host literally all Nvidia drivers that are released through various channels (e.g., OEMs, developers, etc.). If you’re getting any of these, watch out for the “MS WHQL Certificate” tag and read the forum comments carefully to avoid potentially buggy drivers. First, you need to click on “Download Driver”, download the package and extract it. Then, right-click on “INF Modified” and save the INF file under the “Display.Driver” directory found inside your driver folder.

That’s it! This will remove all hardware checks and will allow you to install NVIDIA drivers on your Mac.

Broadcom Wi-Fi Drivers: The broadcom chip is present in most recent MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Minis. Station-Drivers.com has the latest drivers. Scroll down to the “Broadcom Wireless 802.11a/b/g/n controller” section and get the latest drivers for your OS.

Realtek HD Audio: The Realtek audio chipset is also very commonly found in Macs. Unfortunately, again, the installation requires you to do some tinkering: Go to Guru3D and download the latest Realtek HD Audio drivers. Make sure not to get the MSI installer, we need the extractable ZIP/EXE format — you’ll see why. Download and extract the file. Go to “Device Manager”, double-click on “Sound, video and game controllers” and then “Realtek High Definition Audio”. Go to the “Driver” tab, click “Update Driver” and point it to your downloaded directory. Hit “OK” to install these drivers! If you don’t follow these steps and just go with the regular installer, you’ll hear no audio out of your speakers — it’s likely one of those weird little Windows on a Mac issues.

Step 7: Enable AHCI or not?

I’ve talked about the missing AHCI drivers before. Thanks to a crippled BIOS emulation and some weird decisions on Apple’s part, the storage controller runs with legacy IDE drivers instead of AHCI drivers, which makes for a noticeable loss in performance.

I’ve read pretty much everything there is to read on this issue and tested all the hacks that help you enable AHCI on your Mac or MacBook. Be warned:

• While, yes, AHCI can be enabled, it’s a dirty hack that changes the Master Boot Record. If anything goes wrong, you’ll spend a couple of hours reinstalling both Mac OS X Lion and Windows so be sure to create a complete image, before you do this.

• All hacks out there work only on Macs with Intel chipsets. Nvidia Chipsets are not supported.

• There’s a good chance that you’ll be stuck with a longer shutdown time (1-2 minutes) and with a non-functional sleep mode! Hibernation continues to work fine.

If these (possible) issues don’t bother you or are less important than the possible performance gain, I’d suggest you give it a go. Obviously, I don’t have to remind you to create an image of both your Mac OS X and Windows partition (see below) first, before you move ahead with changing the master boot record (MBR).

Start Windows 7 and fire up “regedit”. Go to the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_ System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci”. Double-click on “Start” and change the value from whatever it is to “0″. Repeat this step with the following keys (if present):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStorV
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor

This will make Windows 7 look for the AHCI controller during the next boot! Restart your machine, hold down your option key and boot directly into Mac OS X Lion — NOT into Windows!

Download the AHCI Enabler (you have to register with the InsanelyMac forums before downloading) and start it. This tool automates the MBR edits necessary to enable AHCI under Windows and works with a variety of Intel chipsets (ICH7, ICH8, ESB63xx, ICH10, 5 Series). Next, select the appropriate volume and wait for the AHCI Enabler to detect the chipset. Then, make a backup of your MBR by clicking on “File” and “Save Backup MBR to File”, and finally click on “Modifiy”.

If you see this error, you’ll either have an NVIDIA or an unsupported Intel chipset (Sandy Bridge).

My MacBook Air 2011 has an Intel Series 6 chipset, which is not yet supported by AHCI Enabler. If all works out for you, jump directly to step 8. If it didn’t work and if you’ve got a Sandy Bridge 2011 MacBook Pro or Air, read further.

So the AHCI Enabler didn’t work out for you? Well, here comes the complicated part:

Download the patched MBR file from OCZTechnologyForums, put the “patchedboot.bin” on an external USB drive and follow the instructions given on their forums in detail. These instructions require you to boot from your OS X Lion Setup DVD (or USB key or most bootable Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Damn Small Linux) and replace the Master Boot Record with the patchedboot.bin.

Step 8: Backup Mac OS X and Windows partitions

Creating a complete image of your Mac (both Mac OS X Lion and Windows) isn’t straightforward: Time Machine has some trouble with Windows partitions and Windows 7/8′s image feature isn’t designed to work with HFS+, either. I tried a couple of backup tools, but stuck with CloneZilla in the end, thanks to its fantastic file system support (Hint: Try out Clonezilla Live to burn a bootable CD/DVD or USB Flash disk to restore an unbootable Mac system).

Questions?

This marks the end of this series, for now! If you’re struggling with some serious Windows+Mac issues, let me know.