How to make an OS X Lion USB thumb drive

Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store  it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer!  So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.

Option 1: Put a full bootable Lion installation on the USB Drive with a recovery partition.

What you need: an 8G thumb drive and OS X Lion from the App Store.

What you get: A USB stick you can boot off and repair your Lion installation from.

Download the Lion installer from Apple App Store. DO NOT INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR THE INSTALLER WILL DELETE ITSELF. MAKE A COPY OF THE INSTALLER.  If you have already installed it and it has deleted itself,  go back into the App store and click on ‘purchases’ and next to Lion it will say ‘Installed’. Now option-click on ‘purchases’ and ‘installed’ will change to ‘install’ so that you can re-download the installer.

Format your Thumbdrive using a GUID Partition Table, and ‘ Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, then you can run the Lion installer and install Lion onto the thumb drive.

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Option 2: Create a Lion Recovery Disk.

You’ll only need a 4G USB Drive for this option.

What you get: A USB stick you can repair your Lion installation from, but not run Lion from.

If your Macintosh has an existing Lion Recovery partition (this will be the case if Lion came pre-installed on your machine when you purchased your computer from Apple), you can use this method. It will not be a fill installer but it will use the internet to install Lion onto another computer. It involves downloading a program from apple called ‘Lion Recovery Disk Assistant’

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

To test if you have a Lion recovery partition, Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion will give you the option of going into recovery mode if the recovery partition is there.

Option 3: Make a Lion Installation USB Thumb drive like the one you buy from Apple.

What you get: A USB stick you can install Lion from – like the one that comes from Apple.

You’ll need an 8G USB thumbdrive.

1. Purchase and download the Lion Installer via the App store as in Option 1 above.

2. Right-click on the installer and select “Show Package Contents” and find  the file called  ”InstallESD.dmg” in the SharedSupport folder.

3. Use Disk Utility to ‘Restore’ this dmg file to a thumb drive to make a Lion Installation USB drive like you buy from the Apple Store. (the thumb drive must first be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Table.)

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How to Air Print to ANY printer from your iPod, iPad or iPhone

Apple has introduced a ‘print’ button onto iPads, iPhones and iPods to allow you to print directly to a printer from your iOS device. Unfortunately  you need a special AirPrint enabled printer. Thankfully there is a free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ that allows you to print to any printer, here’s where to get it and how to use it.

AIRPRINT

On your iPhone at the bottom of some apps is a ‘share’ button. If you click this button you get a menu of different ways to share the content, one of these options is ‘print’ as shown below.

Share Button

Print Button

When you press the ‘Print’ button you will be given an option to choose a printer, but unless you have a special AirPrint printer’ you will see no printers here at all.  (I have a Canon IR5000, a Canon inkjet, a Xerox and a HP and none of them are AirPrint!)

If you don't have an AirPrint printer there will be no printer here to select

AIRPRINT ON NON-AIRPRINT PRINTERS

If you want your non-airprint printer to appear then you can download the following free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ from netputing.

Click here to go to the netting page to find the latest  AirPrint Activator.

Click here to download version 2  directly.

This will download a little application called ‘AirPrint Activator’. You may need to click on the ‘downloads’ button in Safari to find it.

Click on the 'Show Downloads' button to find it.

Now run airPrint Activator by  double clicking the AirPrint Activator application. You should get a window that looks like the one below. Press the slider to ‘Turn On’ AirPrint.

In order for a printer to appear in AirPrint Activator you need to give people permission to print to it by sharing it. To do this go to System Preferences (Under the Apple Menu on the top left of your screen) and then Click on ‘Print & Scan’.

To find printer sharing click on 'Print & Scan'

In printer sharing preferences you need to select your printer on the left and then click the ‘Share this Printer’ box.

The final step - turn on Printer Sharing

The Printer should now appear in your iPad or iPhone printing menu!

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Turbocache in XP

First, install your video drivers. You've probably already done this, but if you want to make sure that you have something recent, do the following:
-Right-click your desktop and click Properties
-Go to the Settings tab
-Click the advanced button
-Go to the Adapter tab (note the Memory Size under Adapter Information)
-Click on Properties button
-Go to the Driver tab
-Check the Driver Date and Driver Version to see if it's at least November 2006 and/or 93.71
-Close the dialogs.
-If your version isn't up-to-date, then download and install the latest nVidia Driver.

Install Rivatuner
-Just download it from here: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163
-Run the installer



Hey, that was easy, right? Now comes the important part:
-Disable Turbocache
-Open Rivatuner
-Go to the Power Users tab
-Click on the Open Matched Database button. It's one of the little ones on the bottom.
-Find and expand the nVidia...System entry in the list
-Find RMDisableRenderToSysMem and set the value to 1
-Close Rivatuner
-Reboot the computer

Double-check to see that your card is "normal" and not using system memory anymore. Repeat the "Verify your driver" steps to view the properties of your video card and see if the memory listed is only what's onboard (up to step 4).

And that should be it! I noticed a performance gain on my system. Probably because it wasn't paging to the system memory. Probably just one less thing the CPU had to keep track of.

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iPhone Error 21 and Solution

iPhones can give you many errors. And, if you are downgrading your iPhone then you might have encountered Error 21. So, do you get this Error 21 frequently?

If yes, then the problem is, instead of landing in Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) mode you are ending up in Recovery mode.

Now, if you can get back to DFU mode that will solve your problem. Once the iPhone is in (DFU) mode, you can follow the following process to downgrade your iPhone.

Procedure

When the iPhone is in DFU mode, this mode will bypass the operating system that is currently installed. This process aids in downgrading or upgrading your Operating System in iPhone. Remember, DFU mode is different from the usual Recovery mode.

The difference between the two modes can be spotted below:

Here, you can see there is no backlight and the screen is blank and black. This indicates that the phone is in DFU mode.

In the figure below, you can see a cable connecting to iTunes icon on the screen. This indicates that the screen is in Recovery Mode.

If there is something on the screen, then that means you are not in the DFU mode.

You have a process that can load the iPhone in DFU mode. Check out that process here:

• First, you need to plug in your iPhone to your Computer.
• Now, turn your phone off.
• Now, for the span of 10 seconds precisely, hold the Power and Home buttons together.
• Now, continue holding the home button and release the power button.
• This has to be done until you hear a beep sound from your Computer
• Now you should see a blank screen sans any display. This indicates that you are in DFU mode.
• Now your restore should work accurately.

If you are having trouble with the 10 seconds time frame, then try adjusting the time to fewer seconds as per your requirement.

So, next time if you have trouble with Error 21, then try restoring the iPhone with this process.

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How To Reinstall Internet Explorer

1. Insert the Win XP CD

2. Open Start / Run and type:



rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 c:\windows\inf\ie.inf

Press ENTER

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Speed up IE7 ( Internet Exlporer 7 )

Now there comes a time in a man life when you have to choose which browser you’re going to use. But for me I picked both, sometimes I want to see whats on the other side. Now Looking for tweaks For IE7 can be a little difficult because almost all articles about tweaking IE7 are all automated and you have to install a third party tweaking software which I don’t like. so what else could do, but to fire up my Registry Editor.

Now We can speed up IE7 page loading especially on multiple tabs and look for this key

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
“MaxConnectionsPerServer”=  Changedit to dword:00000010
“MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server”=Changed it to dword:0000010

Since I rarely use IE7… so Its a bit rusty when i opened it to try it for the first time.. but after closing and restart IE a noticed a difference and ohhh yeahh.. it’s goodboom you’re done.. Exit regedit restart your PC and enjoy the fast loading of pages.

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Windows uses 20% of your bandwidth Here's how to Get it back

A nice little tweak for XP. Microsoft reserve 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes (suspect for updates and interrogating your machine etc..)

Here's how to get it back:

Click Start-->Run-->type "gpedit.msc" without the "

This opens the  group policy  editor. Then go to:


Local Computer Policy-->Computer Configuration-->Administrative Templates-->Network-->QOS Packet Scheduler-->Limit Reservable Bandwidth


Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the 'Explain' tab :

"By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default."

So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO.

This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

I have tested on XP Pro, and 2000

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