Starting in Mac OS X Leopard, you may have noticed that when you download a file from the web and go to open it, you will get a prompt saying something along these lines.

This is Mac OS X just being safe, but if you always know for sure what you’re downloading it could even be overly safe. You can disable this quarantine message by launching the Mac Terminal and typing the following command:

You will then need to reboot (although killing the Finder should work as well) for the changes to take effect. To reverse this and get the file quarantine message back, type:

Again you will need to reboot (or kill the Finder) to have the changes back.

You can use the tab key to autocomplete any path in the Finder Go To Folder window (Command+Shift+G).

To try it out, open the Go To Folder window and start typing the path to a folder, like ~/Library/Pre then hit the tab key to complete the rest of “Pre” with “Preferences” – this is extremely useful when you are accessing lengthy paths in your filesystem.

Auto-completion should be familiar to anyone with a unix background, since it is regularly used within the command line interface.

If you frequently access a file server from a Mac it’s pretty helpful to map the network drive to your desktop. There’s two ways to do this, one method is just mapped for one time use and will reset after a reboot, and another method is a more permanent route that allows the mapped network drive to always appear and mount on your desktop after system reboots and user logins.

Map a network drive to Mac OS X

This method maps a network drive that will disappear if the network connection drops or if you reboot your Mac:

• From the Mac OS X Finder, hit Command+K to bring up the ‘Connect to Server’ window
• Enter the path to the network drive you want to map, ie: smb://networkcomputer/networkshare and click ‘Connect’
• Enter your login/password and click “OK” to mount the network drive
• The drive will now appear on your desktop and in the Finder window sidebar

Map a network drive to Mac OS X that re-mounts after system reboot

This method allows you to reboot your Mac and have the mapped network drive automatically remount and appear on the desktop, this is more persistent than the above method:

• From the Finder, hit Command+K
• Enter the path to the network drive you want to map, ie: smb://networkcomputer/networkshare and click ‘Connect’
• Enter your login credentials and click “OK”
• The drive is now mounted, but continue on to map for system reboot persistence
• Now enter into System Preferences, from the Apple menu
• Click on ‘Accounts’
• Click on “Login Items”
• Click on the + button to add another login item
• Locate the network drive you previously mounted and click “Add”
• Exit out of System Preferences

Your network drive will now be mapped and automatically remounted when you reboot your Mac.

Make the mapped network drive visible on the Mac desktop

It’s possible that the mounted drive will not appear on the desktop due to a system setting. If you want the mapped drive icon to be visible on the Desktop, be sure to do the following additional steps:

• From the Finder, open Finder Preferences by hitting Command+,
• Click the General tab
• Select the checkbox next to ‘Connected Servers’
• Close Finder Preferences

Selecting the checkbox next to Connected Servers ensures that you’ll see the icon on your Mac Desktop, otherwise it will only be visible in the Finder window sidebars and Open/Save dialogues.

Remount mapped network drive with a click

A great additional step for either method is to create an alias of the mapped network drive. This allows you to reconnect to the share with just a click. Here’s how to do this:

• Right-click on the mapped network drive on the Mac OS desktop
• Select “Make Alias”

Now you can double-click that alias to reconnect to the network drive instantly.

It’s easy to hide the Mac hard drive icons, but what about all the other stuff that gets dumped to your desktop? Well that’s easy to hide too actually, following these instructions:

Clean up the Desktop by Hiding Desktop Icons

Launch Terminal and type the following:

After hitting enter, you’ll want to kill the Finder so that it relaunches and the changes take effect:

All of the files will still exist, but they’re now discretely hidden in your home folder’s “Desktop” directory rather than cluttering up your actual desktop.

To show the Desktop icons again, open the Mac Terminal and type the following:

Again, kill the Finder and your icons will show on the desktop as usual.

1. Click Start. Then choose a library you want to change. Let's pick up "Pictures", for example.

2. Right-click on "Pictures" and select "Properties".

3. Press "Include a folder" to add folder to a library. You may add several folders.

4 Also, you may choose, to show or not, the link for this library in the Start menu.

5. Press "OK" to confirm changes.

Normally to make hidden folders and files visible, the Folder Options configurator should be opened and the appropriate boxes checked. But, some viruses can disable this option in order to prevent hidden files from the possibility being visible. The common symptom of this problem is that every time you try to activate "Show Hidden Files and Folders" option and press Ok, it just flashes and no hidden files or folders are shown. The second symptom is that this option "Show Hidden Files and Folders" simply disappears from the list.

This problem can be fixed very easily by editing Windows registry entry:

1. Navigate to [Start] > [Run] > type in: "regedit" without quotation marks. Press Enter.

2. In the Registry Editor window navigate to the following registry key

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced"

On the right pane, double click on "Hidden" value and change its value to "1".

USB flash drives are great because they are really cheap and you can conveniently move data between computers. The only problem is when you store sensitive data on a USB drive and it gets lost or stolen! We will use Windows Encrypting File System to create an encrypted folder on a thumb drive that only one user account on one computer can read. Later we’ll talk about how you can view those files on another computer, but for now we’ll focus on just having a secure USB drive.

Step 1 – Format USB drive in NTFS format

Firstly, you have to make sure the USB drive is formatted in NTFS format. Most USB drives are formatted in FAT16 or FAT32 format, which does not support encryption at all.

Step 2 – Create an Encrypted Folder

Ok, now that your USB drive is in NTFS format and all the data has been erased, we can setup a folder that will contain all the encrypted data.

What I like about this method is that you can store all the sensitive files in the encrypted folder, but store other files normally outside the folder. That way, you can still pop the USB drive into someone else’s computer and they can view all the files not in the encrypted folder.

Go to My Computer, open the flash drive, right-click and choose New Folder. Name the folder anything you want, but try not to make it obvious that it has sensitive data otherwise people might be more inclined to try and get in.

Now right-click on the new folder and choose Properties. Click on the Advanced button in the Attributes section.

Now check the Encrypt contents to secure data box. Click OK and click OK again to close out the dialogs.

Now you’ll see the folder is in green, which means the data is encrypted. That’s it! Now you have a folder on your USB drive that is fully encrypted and viewable only by your user account on that one computer.

By default all Windows operating system hide extensions for known files types. It means that all files will be named without its extension, only its names. For instance file "new.txt" is shown as "new" and in case if we need to see file extension we should enable this option. Following instructions show how to enable or disable displaing of file extension.

1. Go to "Start", "Control Panel", "Folder Option" and click on "View" tab.

2. Scroll down until you see "Hide extensions for known file types" check box.

3. Clear it if you want to show file extensions and check it if you want to hide.

Today's technologies allow us to save huge amounts of files and information on hard disks, flesh drives. But in some cases, we may need more space than it is available on hard disk. The solution of this issue is easy and simple: files and folders compression.

Note:

1. Hard drive must be formatted with NTFS.

2. You should have enough space for uncompressed file (if you want to uncompress it in future, you will need this space, otherwise you won't uncompress it), so that you can compress it.

How to compress contents:

1. Choose the folder you want to compress. Right click on it and choose [Properties].

2. On the [General] Tab, navigate to [Advanced] button and press it.

3. Check the box [Compress contents to save disk space].

4. After you choose [Compress contents to save disk space] option and press [Enter], a new window will appear.

It prompts whether to Apply changes to the current folder only or to Apply changes to current folder, subfolders and files.

5. After applying changes, check the size of the folder.

Note: The compressed folder name is coloured with blue now.