Stop Doing These 8 Things On Your Mac

hi this is gary with macmost.com here are 8 things you should stop doing with your Mac Mac Moses brought to you thanks to a group of more than 500 supporters go to macmost.com slash patreon there you could read more about it join us and get exclusive content so I've been using Macs for more than 30 years and helping people work their backs for more than 12 often when someone is happening a problem is because they're practicing a technique or doing something that they really should stop doing so for instance I hear people having a lot of trouble using printers they're using cheap inkjet printers I hate inkjet printers I find that they only really work well when you first get them using the original ink and if you stop using them for a little while the ink kind of dries up and doesn't work quite right anymore if you try to save some money on ink and not get manufacturers ink the colors don't look great anymore and I find they break down easily there's just all sorts of trouble I'm a big believer in a paperless office and I try to print as little as possible if I do need to print I use a laser printer laser printers used to be very expensive and some people still think of them as such but in fact they're pretty cheap now for between 100 or 200 dollars you can get a black and white laser printer which is probably what most people need just to print out simple documents but for about $200 you can get a color laser printer as well and instead of buying ink you buy toner and toners much more consistent and laser printers just don't seem to break down as often I'm using the one I have for years but I'll go months without using it and when I start it up and print something out it looks just as good as the first day I got it so my main tip is to try to print out less if you carry an iPhone with you then put documents on your iPhone or access them by iCloud instead of carrying a printed copy around and if you must use printouts then think about getting a laser printer even if you spend a little more money upfront it'll pay for itself in less frustration in years to come now probably one of the most major categories I get asked questions about is email and email problems often come down to the email provider not the mail app on your Mac or iPhone or iPad email is really all about the server it's which server you're using if you're using ISP email that's the free email you get from AT&T for Rhys and Comcast whoever your ISP that's like the bottom of the barrel there are all sorts of problems with ISP email not to mention the fact that if you move and you have a new service you won't be able to take your email address with you instead go with a big online email provider the only two that I really can recommend our Apple's email service iCloud or use Google's Gmail both of these work great they cut down on the amount of spam you'll get they're portable to whatever you move to and they use all the modern email techniques so that things should work a lot smoother I often get asked questions about bookmarks and usually they involve somebody that has hundreds or thousands of saved bookmarks stop using bookmarks so much basically bookmarks are great if there's a website you need to go to really often or maybe not so often like maybe once a month to pay a bill but don't use bookmarks for a site that you won't be going back to consistently if it's just an article that you want to read later use the reading list built into Safari that way you can go back to it read it later and then it goes away it's not stored permanently cluttering up your bookmarks bookmarks are also handy for security you could bookmark say a banking site and know by using that bookmark you're going to the real site not some fake site that an email may include so you should leave your bookmarks as clear as possible think of having less than a hundred bookmarks as being ideal use reading lists for other things and also trust yourself that you could find something interesting later on if you see a page that's kind of interesting but you're not sure you may go back to it don't bookmark it trust yourself that later on you could do a similar search and find the same page now I know a lot of people don't want to pay Apple a monthly price for iCloud but then those same people sometimes ask me questions about how they can do something which I count is perfect for iCloud is great for being able to share your files across your devices it's great for having all the photos every photo you've ever taken in your pocket on your iPhone or having new pictures you take on your iPhone instantly get into your photos library without having to sync and transfer things most people can get by with the $0.99 per month iCloud plan and even I use only the $3 a month plan which gives you a ton of data you pay a premium to use Apple product you could have a very cheap Windows computer super cheap Android tablet and a free Android phone if you really wanted but we all pay a premium to use Apple products because they work really well well then why miss out on some of the best features just because you don't want to pay ninety nine cents a month so this one's really specific and I've done videos on this before stop shutting down your Mac a typical Mac should never be shut down you should just put it to sleep or let it go to sleep on its own when you do this while it's sleeping it performs maintenance tasks if you don't let it sleep instead shut it down as soon as you're done using it it started up when you want to start using it again then it's going to try to perform those maintenance tasks while you're working slowing you down and sometimes they can really build up things like backup spotlight indexing and such could really take up a lot of processor time but they won't bother you if you just let your Mac sleep so it can do this maintenance and also I find a lot of fear there about updating your Mac up taking to the next minor version or the next major version of the operating system and I understand this fear in general people don't like change you know how to use everything on your Mac now and when you update things change a little bit but to get the most out of your Mac I think you really need to embrace change you need to upgrade to the latest operating system learn what has changed use the new features to be able to use your Mac to its fullest after all you paid for your Mac which includes all these upgrades so if you're not upgrading to the latest operating system you're not getting your money's worth out of your back and we all know we should back up right but a lot of people procrastinate when setting up a backup you get your Mac you think well I will maybe next month to get myself an external drive and start backing out with time machine and then you wait and wait and wait don't procrastinate do not have a time machine back up going now order a hard drive today just get a standard USB 3 hard drive doesn't have to be super fast hook it up to your Mac and start a time machine back up and don't do anything less than the default backup I know people that only backup the rack like once a week or once a month that's a really bad idea I mean you do once a month and something goes wrong with your Mac you could be one to three weeks behind on all of your data which could be a big disaster just use it as it's to be used keep it plugged in let it do its backup every our hourly backups barely take any time because usually not much has changed over the period of an hour now if you have a MacBook and you can't keep it plugged in all the time just get into a regular routine have it plugged in every night for instance or use a network drive so it's automatically doing the backups when you're home connected to your Wi-Fi at the very least if using a MacBook consider storing all your files in a cloud service either iCloud Dropbox or something else because then at least if something happens to your Mac and you haven't been doing regular backups you probably have all your files still available to you on the cloud you won't lose everything so this last one is kind of tricky basically the thing is I see people will have a problem with their Mac don't assume when you have a problem that that's how it's supposed to work instead investigate how to find out if there's a better way to do it or maybe find out if it's supposed to work this way at all and if not try to fix the problem or get some help this is very common and I think a lot of us may be myself included fall into this trap and assume they can't do something because it just doesn't work that way when in fact you just need to solve the problem one example may be thinking that you can't sort files in the finder or music in the music app when you just need to figure out that you need to click on the top of the column to sort by that column another example may be a system preference that you set when you weren't using that feature much and now that you are you'll find it's not working the way it does for everybody else you just need to learn more about it figure out that there's a system preference for that and change that back and now you can use that feature I guess the general tip here is question everything if something isn't working right or if something doesn't work like you think it should then don't assume that's just because it's the way it is try to solve the problem and see if you can get working the way you want so please take these suggestions to heart my goal here is to help improve everybody's experience and help you get the most from your Mac I published new tutorials every weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out then hit the little bell icon to get notifications for each new tutorial

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 151,826

Keywords: things to avoid on your mac, mac troubleshooting, mac problems, mac bad practices, mac issues, better mac, use mac right, the right way to do things on your mac, Stop Doing These 8 Things On Your Mac, stop doing these things on your mac, stop doing these things on your mac immediately, Mac, problems, practices, technqiues, misuse, MacMost

Id: PAzpXwZrQtM

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019