The Tech Loft

If you’ve installed a Solid State Drive (SSD) in your laptop, there’s an important final step often missed; and that’s enabling TRIM. WHY ENABLE TRIM? When you simply “delete” a file on a traditional hard drive, it’s not really “erased.” Instead, its location on the drive is reported to the OS as “empty, even though the ones and zeroes are still there, ready to be overwritten. On SSDs, however, overwriting data can take a considerably longer time than writing to “unused” space.  As solid state drives became more affordable, the TRIM command was introduced to facilitate “garbage collection” of deleted data, allowing the SSD to reset those “unused” blocks back to an “empty” state. This allows for better performance for many SSDs. ENABLING TRIM ON OS X 10.9 and 10.8 Backup the file we’re patching “sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFami...

Whether you’re Windows or Mac owner we ALL want our computers to run in fast and timely manner. Sometimes it seems that in a Windows world, there are more optimization tips you can run than on a Mac. For example, for those who are still using platter hard drives, Windows has disk defragmentation. But of course, this option is not found in Macs because (from what I’ve heard) OS X stores documents in a manner that does not need fragmentation. So let’s go over a few easy tips that will help you keep you Mac running speedily along. And don’t worry, these easy tips that will not suggest you swap out your drive for a solid state unit. Hopefully you’ll enjoy my list of curated tips on speeding up a mac! 1. Clean Your Hard Disk Drive If you have old photos, movies or music that you don’t access anymore, I would suggest moving them to another storage device. Having your hard drive full will increase access times so it’s best to keep it lean. To view what...

The Computer You want to start recording music on your Mac……. ……What do I do? How do you set it up to record and create music? Here is the SIMPLE and EASY guide in 6 Steps.   Step One – The Drives First, buy a Solid State Drive. Click here to watch a video on replacing your Macbook harddrive. It is easy, and takes very little time. This will give you huge improvements RIGHT AWAY. …..And make sure your software, and the music you record are on two separate drives. (VERY IMPORTANT)   Step Two – RAM-a-lama Bang Bang RAM. You can almost never have enough. Put the max in, and you will see the improvements you want. The Tech Loft has a great vid on upgrading RAM right here. It doesn’t take long!   If you’re loving this article, share it on Twitter by  clicking here   Step Three – The Format Once you have your new drive installed – do a clean install of OSX. This will speed up your Mac immediately. ONLY take...

With owning a Apple MacBook Pro and iMac, I’ve asked myself what maintenance can I run on my Macs to keep them in running order. Apple brags that their other products “just work,” so many people never consider regular maintenance for their Macs. For the most part, there’s really little upkeep that you need to do, and much of the maintenance tasks are ones you would do on a PC as well. First thing you’ll want to perform is regular software updates on the Mac (under the Apple menu > Software Update). You can configure Apple’s Software Update to automatically check for updates regularly. Regular backups are also an essential part of computer maintenance;  Apple’s built-in Time Machine backup program is pretty good. You’ll find Time Machine in the Applications folder. Besides those two things, the Mac maintenance article on Apple’s support site recommends organizing your files, archiving old files, and physically cleaning your comput...

LOVING MY WESTERN DIGITAL MY BOOK LIVE So I picked up a new Western Digital My Book Live. Enjoying it, still learning how to use it. However I received an error message while using My Live Book. THE REASON FOR THIS POST Error Code -8072. I was prompted with -8072 while trying to delete a few files off the network drive. The reason for the error was not enough permissions. It’s odd that I don’t have enough permissions because I’m the one who uploaded the file to My Book Live originaly. So here’s a way to get around Error Code -8072. Amazon.com Widgets     RESOLVING THE ERROR CODE -8072 Open up Terminal and enter the following: sudo rm -rf (then drag the file.folder you wish to delete into the Terminal window) Press ENTER and the file should be deleted. httpv://youtu.be/8RPMvpeJK_w Hope this short quick post helps!   Please leave comments if this solution works for you.