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Tips and tutorials to help you use your Macintosh |
By Terry Lawrence, program director MacWest Computer Society, Vancouver. British Columbia The Hard Disk is the warehouse of your computer. When you first get your computer, your Hard Disk window will probably look like a warehouse that someone started to organize, got a few shelves set up and labeled, and then just dumped most the boxes helter skelter all over the floor. Your System Folder will be organized, and your Internet Folder might be, but your Applications Folder, your Documents Folder, your Apple Extras folder, Utilities Folder, and so forth, probably contain a jumble of programs, free software, shareware, utilities, installer logs, and other odds and ends. The first thing you need to do is rearrange everything in a way that makes sense to you, so you can find what you need when you want it. To make this easier, open the Hard Disk by double clicking it’s Icon at the top right hand corner of your display. The startup disk, which is usually your Hard Disk, will always be in the top right hand corner of the display. If that Icon is not the Hard Disk, it’s because you booted from another disk such as a CD ROM, and your Hard Disk Icon will be immediately below the start-up (boot) disk Icon. When the Hard Disk window opens, click the mouse pointer once in the Hard Disk window to activate it, and then place the mouse pointer on “View” in the menu bar at the top left side of the display, just to the right of File and Edit. Holding the mouse button down, drag down to the third item, “As List”, and let go of the mouse button when it highlights. This will cause your Hard Disk window to sort all the folders, documents, and other items into an alphabetical list, ready to reorganize. Setting up and labeling the shelving (Folders) in your warehouse. There is only one folder on your Hard Disk that definitely has a particular name, and whose name cannot be changed. That is the System Folder. Do not tinker with this folder or it’s contents until you know what your are doing. Above all, do not rename the System Folder or anything in it, or you will be in big trouble, amigo. If your computer cannot find a System Folder with that name on the Hard Disk, it will be unable to start up from the Hard Disk. Almost everything else is fair game. You can make as many folders as you like, and name them Huey, Dewy, and Louie if you so desire. However, I would recommend naming them to reflect their contents. You should have a Folder named Utilities, one named Documents, one named Internet, one named Applications, and maybe one for Read Me’s, one for Assistants, and one for Extras or Miscellaneous. Don’t make too many top level folders. Keep it simple. These folders are multi-layered, as you will see shortly. Don’t have more than a dozen at the root, or top, level, or it starts getting harder to find things. When you open your Hard Drive window, you just want to see a handful of main categories. I have 9 level one folders at the moment. They are: Apple Extras, Applications, Documents, Internet, Peripherals, Read Me Files, Setup Assistants, System Folder, and Utilities. Apple Extras is a catch-all, Internet contains all my Internet related programs, all Read Me files are placed where I can find them in this folder, various set-up assistants such as Internet set-up assistant are dumped in that folder, and Utilities contains all utility application programs. Besides the System Folder, you definitely want a folder named “Documents”. This is where you keep everything you write, your scanned images if you have a scanner, and all your work in general. The reason is twofold: first, you can set the General Controls panel to automatically place everything you save into the Documents folder, and second, it keeps all your saved work in one folder where you can find it, open it, and copy it easily, until you get more familiar with where things are on your computer. To have your work automatically saved into the Documents folder by default, click on the Apple Icon at the top left of the display, choose Control Panels > General Controls, and click the button on the bottom right of the General Controls window that says when saving or opening a Document, take me to “Documents Folder”. Once you are more familiar with the Save and Open dialogue boxes, you can save things in any folder you like, anywhere on your Hard Disk. But for beginners, this way you will at least know where to look for that letter to Mom that disappeared after you clicked the “Save” button. Creating new Folders. To create a new folder where you can easily find and and name it, click once out in the Finder window. That’s the display screen that opens when you first start the computer. You can always access the Finder by clicking on the word at the extreme top right hand corner of your display and choosing “Finder” to activate the Finder. Now, hold down the Command key (the one with the Apple on it) and press “N”, as in New. Poof! A new, empty folder will appear in the Finder, probably just below the Hard Disk icon. Click once in the name, which will probably read “untitled folder”, wait a few seconds for it to highlight, and then type in whatever name you want - Applications, for example - or Utilities. By clicking and dragging on the bottom right corner, resize your Hard Disk window so it fills just the left hand third of your screen. Now drag your renamed folder into the open Hard Disk window (but not on top of another folder) and let go. It will sort itself alphabetically in the list. You can also just drag and drop it onto the Hard Disk icon, if you want the folder to go onto the top level of the Hard Disk. The advantage of dragging it into the open Hard Disk window is that you can place subfolders into the top level folders by this method. For example, you create a folder named “Letters to Mom” or “Flower Club Financial Statements” and drop it onto the Documents folder where it becomes a sub-folder. Within Flower Club Financial Statements you might create sub-folders for Income and Expenses, for example. Sorting out the Wheat from the Chaff. Now that you have created a dozen or less top level folders with names that tell you what is in them, start sorting out your Hard Disk window by going through all the existing folders, (except the System Folder), and dragging all your other folders into the appropriate top level folders. For example, drag all your utilities such as Disk First Aid, Norton Utilities, Conflict Catcher, File Buddy, Drive Setup, or Techtool, into your Utilities Folder. Drag and Drop all your Read Me’s into your Read Me Folder, and all your Internet applications and set-up files into the Internet Folder. Now you’re getting organized. Using Sub-Folders to keep big files manageable. Finally, create sub-folders and drop them into the main category folders. For example, within the top level Applications Folder, create sub-folders such as Word Processing Applications, Photo Editing Applications, Games, Database Applications, Taxes and Financial Applications, and so forth. Place Application programs such as AppleWorks, Microsoft Word, or Corel into Word Processing, Quicken, QuickTax, or Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) into Taxes and Financial, Kai’s Photo Soap, Color It, and Photoshop into Photo Editing; and Nanosaur, Tomb Raider, and Crop Circles into Games. You can now quickly access anything by looking at the top level of the Hard Disk window and saying “Quicken” - that’s a financial Application. Open Applications, and the next level would include a Taxes and Financial folder. It’s probably in there, right where it should be, along with all the other financial applications. If your sub-folders start to get too many files or applications, and the list is extending out of the window, it’s time to further subdivide. The idea is, don’t let a folder get big enough that you can’t see everything in it without scrolling. For example, I have over 50 games in my Games folder, so I have subdivided them into Flight Simulators, Arcade Games, Simple Games, Card Games, Action Games, 3D Games, and so on. So to find a Flight Simulator game such as Flying Circus, I open the folders like this: Hard Disk > Applications > Games > Flight Simulators > Flying Circus I can thereby go directly to Flying Circus without scrolling at all. Of course, once you have it organized, there are better and faster ways to access everything on your Hard Disk directly from the Finder by using the Apple Menu, Contextual Menus, and Aliases, but that is the subject of next month’s getting started article. |