You don’t have to use a smartphone for more than a week to amass a staggering amount of crap on it, from text messages and phone numbers to personal settings and photo libraries, and as with your laptop or desktop, a significant portion of this crap is stuff that you want to keep. And mobile phone backup isn’t just a matter of keeping copies of data that you consciously archive every day, like contacts, photos and notes – it’s about keeping copies of information that you didn’t even know you wanted. How many times have you needed to dig through an old text message conversation? Referred back to your received call list to recover a number you didn’t save? People: back it up. You’ll feel better.

By platform:

iPhone

If you’ve got an iPhone, there’s a good chance you’ve already sat through – and been annoyed by – its backup routine. iTunes updates your iPhone’s backups at every sync, which makes users’ lives a bit easier, and guarantees some kind of safety net by default. But! As with most fully automated systems, iTunes backup is kind of enigmatic. It just sort of… happens.

What it’s doing is performing a full backup equivalent. In other words, instead of just mirroring your entire device as a big image file, it’s extracting all the useful bits, so it can restore your iPhone as if it had undergone a full, mirrored backup. This includes, among other things, bookmarks, app settings and data (including in-app purchases, but not the apps themselves), contacts, call history, Mail accounts, SMSes, videos and photos. In other words, pretty much everything. Backups are performed automatically, and restoring to one is a simple matter of plugging in your iPhone, alt-clicking on its icon in iTunes and selecting “Restore from Backup”.

Crucially, this is different from selecting “Restore” in the device summary page: doing that will restore from a clean, factory-default image, which will delete all your personal data. Not what we’re trying to do here! (Though if you attempt to do this, you will be prompted to perform a backup, which should be a red flag.)

iTunes stores its backups as archived files in semi-cryptic directories, so if you want to pull them out of the close iTunes system for proper backup, i.e. to an external HDD or online storage solution, you can find them here:

On a Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

On Windows XP: Documents and Settings(username)Application DataApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup

On Windows Vista: Users(username)AppDataRoamingApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup

To add a backup to to iTunes, simply copy it back to its default directory, and it should show up as a restore option, labelled by date, when you’re setting up a wiped or recently capital “R” Restored iPhone or iPod Touch.

Android

Google’s philosophy with Android backup and sync has been translucent, perhaps to a fault: Since it depends so much on web services, it doesn’t need to be backed up! It’s already backed up, in the cloud! We’re freakin’ Google, y’all! THIS IS THE FUTURE! (Carried to its logical conclusion, this is the Chrome OS ethos. Anyway.) This is fine, and can be put to good use: Gmail and Gcal are always safe, and your contacts can be added to your Google account too – should you designate them to be saved as Google contacts, not just SIM or Phone contacts. To do this:

1. Open your Contacts list
2. Press the Menu button
3. Select Import
4. Tick the “Google Contacts” box

But for anyone who wants to back up more than their Google-service-based info, this doesn’t really help. For that, you’ll need to go third-party. There are lots of backup apps for Android, but they’re all paid, either immediately or after a free trial. I assume just go with the best free(ish) solutions, all of which you can find by searching for their names in the Android Market.

Backup apps on Android are split into two types: the all-in-one apps that sync your data to a single file, and the piecemeal apps. Unfortunately, the AIO apps tend to be paid; doing this for free takes multiple downloads. Download these three apps: SMS Backup and Restore, Call Logs Backup & Restore, and APN Backup & Restore. Each one backs up its respective data to your microSD card (in /sdcard/*appname*BackupRestore/) for easy restoration on another phone. Using these apps is self-explanatory, since there are only three buttons: Backup, Restore and Delete.

Astro File Manager fills a remaining gap: app backup. It’s a free file browser at heart, so the backup option is kind of hidden – once in the app, press the menu button, then click “Tools”. Select “Application Manager/Backup”, and you’ll be able to backup your apps to your SD card. To restore, just install this same app on the device, insert the old SD card, navigate to the same “Application Manager/Backup screen” again, and select the “Backed Up Apps” tab. Astro is also a solid file browser, you can can manually move your data – like photos and videos – to a microSD card, where you should probably be storing them anyway. [Pic via]

There! Sprite Mechanic does the same in a slightly simpler way, but I’m hearing reports that it’s a bit buggy on certain handsets. Still, it’s free, so it may be worth a try.

Lastly, if you’ve got a rooted phone, Backup for Root Users backs up virtually everything, and it’s totally free. That catch? You need to have a rooted phone, or else it won’t work. Which is a crying shame.

Palm Pre/Pixi

Where Android’s cloud-based not-really-a-backup system has gaping holes, the Pre’s is actually pretty good: Backup is performed automatically, every day, and linked to your user account. This covers the absolute basics, though. For example, a list of apps is kept server-side, but the app data itself isn’t back up; browser bookmarks are remembered, but no form data or website passwords. Media isn’t backed up at all. Here’s the full list. The solution is a bit hackish, but it works fine for most data. From PreCentral, a brief guide on backing up using either Microsoft’s Sync Toy for PC, or with slight, obvious modifications, ChronoSync for Mac:

1. Plug in the Pre and select USB Drive.
2. Download SyncToy and install.
3. Click SyncToy on your desktop to run SyncToy for the first time.
4. Click Create New Folder Pair. For the Left Folder, Browse to the Pre’s Drive (maybe E: or F:)
5. For the right folder browse to your documents folder and create a new subdirectory such as PreBackup and select it.
6. Choose to Synchronize and name your folder pair something easy to remember like PreBackup.
7. Click Run.

What you’re doing here is essentially backing up the Pre’s internal storage, bit for bit. Unfortunately, this doesn’t back up settings and some application data, so restoring from this image won’t ensure that you don’t lose some data; just media, ringtones, etc.

Between this, Palm’s backup and the natural backup inherent in being tied to online services like Gmail and Flickr, the only thing not really backed up properly is specific application data and SMS conversations.

Windows Mobile

Microsoft has always offered some kind of backup out of the box, and as of the release of version 6.5, there are multiple options. The core backup utility, of course, is Windows Mobile Device centre, or as it’s known in XP, ActiveSync. Pairing your device with these apps is quite simple, and takes care of most of the data you could want to back up, including contacts, calendar appointments and media.

In XP, download and install ActiveSync, and when you plug in your phone, start the ActiveSync app, which you should be prompted to open anyway. Set up a pairing relationship, select the data you want to backup, and you’re good to go.

In Vista, you’ll need to download Windows Mobile Device Center and do the same; in Windows 7, you should be prompted to install Windows Mobile Device centre as soon as you plug in a WinMo handset.

Now, let’s assume you’re not using a Windows PC, or you don’t want to bother with setting up a sync relationship with a computer. You’ve got two free options, which together back up even more data than ActiveSync, without and external machine.

My Phone, another Microsoft app, is available for free to any Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1 or 6.5 user. It’s a misleadingly basic-seeming little app, which backs up nearly everything you store on your phone: [By default]: contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, photos, videos, text messages, songs, browser favourites and documents between your phone and your My Phone web account. Restoring from My Phone is just a matter of logging into your Live account from within the app. You get 200MB of free storage, after which you’ve got to pay. Still: pretty fantastic.

If you want to back up your phone’s data without a PC or a cloud-based service, there’s PIM Backup. This utility feels and looks kind of ancient, but it’s great at what it does. And what does it do? Everything:

– backup/restore appointments
- backup/restore call logs
- backup/restore contacts
- backup/restore messages (SMS, Mails, …) NEW !!!
- backup/restore speed dials
- backup/restore tasks
- backup/restore custom files

Best of all, it stores your backup in a single file, which can be restored on any device using the same app. The procedure is dead-easy: Download the PIM CAB file to your device, install it, open it, check the data you want to back up off the list, and go. To restore, you go through the exact same interface, selecting “Restore” from the app’s pulldown menu instead of “Back Up”. In the spirit of safety, you’re going to want to back up PIM’s backup files. PIM lets you designate where you’d like to store its backups; select your microSD card if you have one. If not, you may want to transfer your backup to a PC or external storage device. (Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this is probably with ActiveSync or Mobile Device Center, since most WinMo phones don’t allow you to browse the root storage in Explorer.)

Still though aside from the iPhone, Windows Mobile offers the most complete backup solutions.

Symbian

Depending on which brand handset and Symbian shell you’re using, your backup options are going to differ. The Ovi Suite will do the trick. It’s a full, automated backup suite, but it’s PC-only and works exclusively with Nokia phones. Using it is as easy as setting up a sync relationship – just install the suite and plug the Nokia phone in via USB, and follow the wizard prompts – and it’ll keep contacts, calendar items and media backed up. [Pic via]

Non-Nokia Symbian users – Samsung folks, listen up – can use a free app called The Symbian Tool. This will actually pull a full image copy from your Symbian phone, meaning that you can restore your phone bit-for-bit to the state it was in at the time of backup. There are also less severe options for media backup. More details here.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments – your feedback is hugely important to our How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy backups, folks!

Your Phone

Windows Mobile: To sync with your Windows Mobile phone in Windows 7, you’re going to need Windows Mobile Device centre 6.1. Just like in Vista! Except this time around, Windows is savvy enough to auto-install the suite, which saves a little time and potentially a lot of Googling. (Just give it a minute after you plug in your device via USB.)

This will take care of calendar, contact and media syncing for the most part, though a lot of newer Windows Mobile phones depend on microSD storage for music and movies. For this, you simply mount the disk as a folder, and drag and drop.

iPhone: As always, this is a job for iTunes. However, Windows 7 is compatible with doubleTwist, an alternative media manager that doesn’t just sync with your iPhone — it works with almost anything else, too.

Speaking of which, Android: Android generally isn’t a “syncing” kind of OS, intended instead to be kept up to date by tapping into Google’s services over the internet. That said, doubleTwist will work for music syncing with most Android phones, and HTC Sync will keep their phones, like the G1 (aka Dream), MyTouch and Hero, in sync with your Outlook Address book, contacts and calendar.

BlackBerry: BlackBerry Media Sync still reigns supreme, for contacts, apps, media and software upgrades.

Palm Pre/Pixi: doubleTwist, again, at least until Palm fully withdraws from their silly slapfight with Apple over iTunes and makes their own client.

Your Zune, iPod or other PMP

Zune: Zune’s software plays nice with Windows 7, but it’s your only choice. And even more so than Apple products, the Zune HD is locked to its client software, meaning there aren’t any alternatives for the time being. Luckily, Zune 4.x is fantastic software — it’s just a shame it’s not optional and that it doesn’t work with other devices.

iPod: As with the iPhone, you’re more or less stuck with iTunes or an app like doubleTwist for music and movie syncing, but that’s not so bad: iTunes in Windows 7 comes with some nice enhancements, including jump list shortcuts that can quickly take you to the iTunes Store, and hoverable controls, which give you quick access to skip, play and pause functions. In some ways, Windows 7 is actually better on Windows 7 than it is on OS X.

Other PMPs: PMPs that rely on raw mass storage never took an advanced degree to use, so it’s interesting to see that they’ve gotten a little simpler in Windows 7. The “Devices and Printers” system in Windows 7 can claim a few advantages over its predecessors, with much better icons — you generally get an reasonable approximation of whatever you’ve plugged in on the devices screen — customised Device Stage interfaces, seen left, and something called Device Containers, which group components of the same device into one icon. Like, if your 3rd-party PMP has internal and expandable storage, Windows won’t just act as if there are two different devices attached; it’ll group them together. Just click them to expand.

And if your third-party PMP does have a syncing app, be wary. Many of them, especially for older players, won’t have been updated for Windows 7. Install them in a compatibility mode for XP or Vista — whichever they’re most compatible with &mdash ;to avoid any potential problems. [pic via]

Your Camera: Camera support is pretty great in Windows 7 so you’ll often be able to just plug your camera in and go. As with PMPs, printers and the like, cameras with multiple storage devices will be lumped into the same icon in Device Stage, which will also (hopefully) display other device info, like remaining battery, photo import options and alternative sync apps.

Windows also puts quick shortcuts in the taskbar for supported cameras.
Unfortunately, Windows 7 doesn’t add anything in the way of RAW support, so you’re going to have to go third party for that. FastPicture’s codec pack supports most of the popular RAW formats used in dSLRs from Nikon, Canon, Sony and the like, and it’s perfectly compatible with Windows 7. And free!

Your Displays

Adding a second monitor to Windows has never been particularly complicated, but the methods have never been all that apparent, either. Along with a refreshed multi-monitor displays settings interface, Windows 7 adds a fantastic shortcut: Windows+P will bring up a monitor management widget, which lets you set your monitor to either off, display duplicate or display extend.

The shortcut also works for enabling a projector. Laptop manufacturers have been adding functionality like this with their own software for years, so it’s good to see Microsoft taking their ideas onboard in 7 — it’s easier for everyone that way.

Windows 7 also ships with a monitor calibration tool — again, something that had to be previously furnished by third-party software or monitor manufacturers. It helps you adjust brightness, contrast, gamma and colour settings with a simple wizard, accessible by navigating to the Display panel in Appearance and Personalization in the Control Panel

Your Other Computers

These are the gadgets your Windows 7 PC has to play nicely with — your other computers. Windows 7 file sharing has gained some new features, but just as many quirks.

Windows 7 PCs: Since most people just want to share some files and get networking setup over with, Windows 7 includes a feature called Homegroups, which lets you share files and media between Windows 7 PCs with almost not setup at all. Think of it as the old network setup wizard from XP and Vista, except much, much simpler. To create a Homegroup, you need to have a version of Windows 7 that’s better, or, uh, more expensive than Starter or Home Basic — those two can connect to Homegroups, but they can’t initiate one.

To create one, just navigate to “Network and Internet” in the Control Panel, or search “Homegroups” in the Control Panel search bar. At the “Share with other computers running Windows 7 page, select “Create a Homegroup,” and designate the types of media you’d like to share. Joining a Homegroup in Windows 7 from Windows 7 should be easy: as soon as you connect to a network with available Homegroups, Windows will prompt you to join. Just enter the passkey generated during the Homegroup creation process.

Windows XP and Vista: Homegroups are nice and new and WOW and all, and they don’t work directly, as Homegroups, with Windows XP and Vista. Thing is, under all the fresh trappings, Homegroups are the same old Windows networking protocols. Accordingly, XP and Vista can still access Windows 7 PCs, just not under the official “Homegroups” guise. So, first: Set up a user account for your client PCs to log in to:

Click the Start button, type “user accounts” in the search box, and then click User Accounts and Family Safety.
Click Add or remove user accounts, and then click Create a new account.

Type a name for the new account, such as “share”.

Click Standard user, and then click Create Account.

Click the tile for the user account you just created, and then click Create a password.

Log on as the user you created (for example, share), and then log off. (This is required so that the user account is created with the correct credentials.)

Now that you’ve got the account set up, connecting should be easy: On Vista, just click Start, then Network, then open the computer you want to access.—.it should be listed by default. Enter the user name and password you’ve just created and you’re there. For XP, the process is similar: Just go to My Network Places, the click View Workgroup Computers, open the computer you want to access and enter your credentials.

From a Mac, the process isn’t necessarily so straightforward. If you’re lucky, your Windows 7 share will just show up in your Finder sidebar, where you can click on it and enter login info when prompted. (Windows 7 still uses basic SMB shares, which OS X is more than equipped to access.) If it doesn’t show up, the process is a little more complicated. Deferring again to MS:

In [Finder] the toolbar, click Go, and then click Connect to Server (or use keyboard shortcut Command +K).
In OS X 10.3.x and later, click Browse, select the computer running Windows 7, and then click Connect. (Or follow the common instructions below.)

If that doesn’t work, click Connect to Server again, and manually enter smb://username@computername/users as the network address, where username is your newly created user account, computername is your Windows 7 machines network name, and users is literally the word users — don’t change that. Alternately, you can use the smb://username@ipaddress/users syntax, where ipaddress is your Windows 7 computers local IP (as in 10.0.0.2 or 192.168.1.102).

Your Streaming Devices and Consoles

Play to: Play To was one of the most touted features in Windows 7, and yeah, it’s pretty cool. Here’s a breakdown:

One of the most potentially groundbreaking features of Windows 7 is “Play To,” the ability to send music, video and photos to any compatible devices on the network, without running any kind of proprietary software, and without any initial setup. Sending a song to a Sonos or a video to an Xbox is-theoretically-just a right-click away.

The important thing to remember here is that “compatible devices” include — or rather, will include — anything that adheres to the DLNA 1.5 standard, from connected TVs to your Xbox 360 to other Windows 7 PCs with Windows Media Player 12. Play To devices show up automatically once they’re connected to your network, it’s just just a matter of enabling the functionality in Windows:

Before using Play To, you will first need to turn on Streaming. To do this, with media player open, click Stream and then click Turn on media streaming. You will then be given some options for sharing media and which devices you wish to allow.

You can right-click the item that you wish to play and move your cursor to the Play To option and select the device you want to receive that media file.

That’s it! To allows a Windows 7 PC to receive Play To streaming, just enable Play To in the receiving computers’ Media Streaming options, located in the Network and Sharing centre in the control panel.

Consoles: As I said before, Play To will stream to the Xbox 360 if it’s in Media Extender mode (that is, connected to a Windows Media centre PC). Chances are, though, you’re going to just want to stream media from your Windows 7 PC to your Xbox 360, controlled from your Xbox 360. Good news: the same old methods work fine here, so shared files with certain codecs, or anything in your Windows Media Center library, are all fair game, and should work straight away. Likewise, the PS3 will play a limited number of video and audio formats streamed from your PC with virtually no configuration, but the utility is limited — especially if you do a lot of downloading, or archive video in a rare codec or container. For both, the solution is the same: Get TVersity, because it’s awesome. Setup isn’t super-easy, but the results are worth it: Pretty much any video you can come up with can be transcoded on the fly to stream on your console. Full instructions are here.

So that’s about it! I’ve only scratched the surface here — this is like Windows 7 Gadget Mediation 101, or maybe 102 — so add your favourite tips and trick in the comments, since your feedback is a huge benefit to our how-to guides. And if you’re still curious about Windows 7 in general, look no further than our Complete Windows 7 Guide.

Why You Should Do This

Last time we threw together a guide like this, things were different. Snow Leopard was but a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye, and in terms of hardware, the Mini 9 was the best thing going — it was pretty much the only netbook you could guarantee would work perfectly. Not to mention the hackintosh process was much, much more complicated. And riskier! And yet, despite all this, it was easy to recommend loading a Mini up with OS X, because to put it bluntly, the results were fantastic.

But the Mini 9 was a bit too small for regular use, and even if it’s still pretty easy to buy one, it’s not officially part of Dell’s product line anymore. Fast forward to now: the Mini 10v is a (quite similar) replacement for the 9, with a slightly larger screen, 160GB HDD standard and 1GB RAM. Most importantly, the keyboard is a bit larger, and the price is wonderfully low: $US300/AU$549 for a netbook that’s completely ready for hackintoshing. Or to put it another way, the 10v is a $US300/AU$549 Apple netbook.

And it isn’t just the hardware that’s changed, it’s the software. Snow Leopard is fast—faster than 10.5—and its new interface features, like Dock Expose, make using OS X on a netbook even easier. Finder is faster, Quicktime has a new interface. It’s a pretty big upgrade from Leopard, is what I’m trying to say.

And installation tools have changed, too. Netbook hackintoshing used to be an all-day process, with external optical drives, Terminal commands, and numerous terrifying driver tweaks. Today, there are simple software utilities to take care of this for you. So let’s recap: Since 2008, the hardware has gotten cheaper and better, OS X more mature, and the installation process easier. Oh yeah, and Snow Leopard retail costs $US30/AU$39. There’s never been a better time to hackintosh — not by a long shot.

That said, one thing hasn’t changed. The same disclaimer:

Even though we’re using a standard retail-purchased copy of OS X, the disclaimer: Apple does not like Hackintoshing. It violates the OS X EULA, and probably won’t make the Dell folks too happy either, should you need to return your hacked Mini 9 for service. So, as always, proceed at your own risk.

Anyway.

What You’ll Need

• Dell Mini 10v. The stock version, at $US300/AU$549, works perfectly.

• BIOS version lower than A06 (A05, A04, A03 all work fine)

Downgrade instructions are available here, though they require a Windows PC for creating a bootable DOS flash drive

• Retail copy of OS X 10.6.x (NOT an OEM copy that comes with a new Mac). An ISO will do fine here.

• An 8GB (or larger) USB flash drive, the faster the better. External HDDs will work too.

• A Mac with a working optical drive, for preparing your flash drive

• Netbook BootMaker (a Mac application)

Preparing Your Flash Drive

The 10v doesn’t have an optical drive, and it’s a pain in the arse to have to go find one, burn a new disc, and do things the old-fashioned way. Installing from a USB flash drive is much, much easier.

1. Insert your flash drive and OS X Retail install disk into your computer

2. Open Disk Utility (searching in Spotlight is the easiest way to get to this)

3. Select your flash drive from the list on the left. Make sure to select the drive itself, not any partitions you may have written to it before.

4. In the right panel, select the “Partition” screen.
5. From the dropdown menu, select “1 Partition,” then click “Options” below the partition map.

6. Select “Master Boot Record”. This will ensure that your Mini 10v can boot from your flash drive. Select a name for your partition—doesn’t really matter what—and apply your changes. Keep in mind this will delete anything you have on your flash drive right now, so back it up if need be.

7. Once this is done, move from the “Partition” screen to the “Restore” screen

8. For your Source, select (by dragging) the OS X install disk from the left panel. Make sure this is the item called something to the effect of “Mac OS Install DVD”, not “Optiarc DVD” or some other hardware title. For the destination, drag your newly-prepared partition over. Click restore.
This will at least an hour, so go have a sandwich or something. Or even better, make sure your Mini 10v is ready for the install, as outlined in the next section.

Ok, once that slog is done, it’s time to let Netbook BootMaker do its magic. And let me be clear: it is magic. What this utility will do is install a special bootloader on your flash drive, which allows your netbook to begin an OS X install. It also throws in a few driver tweaks, to make sure your 10v, y’know, works.

9. Running BootMaker is easy—just open the app, select your OS X partition on your newly-minted flash drive, and tell it to GO GO GO.

Aaaaand that’s it! You’re ready to start hackintoshing.

Installing OS X

First, you’re going to need to do some light prep on your 10v.

10. Jump into the BIOS, since we’re going to need to check on a few things. You can do this by restarting the 10v, and hitting F2 as the Dell logo first shows up.

11. Double-check to see if you have the right BIOS. As long as it’s lower than A06, you’re fine. If not, refer back to the “What You’ll Need” section.

12. Cycle over to the “Advanced” screen, where you’ll see a list of options. USB BIOS Legacy support should be enabled, as should Bluetooth.
13. Now cycle over to the Boot screen. This is where you tell your 10v which drive to boot from. Generally, this will the hard drive where your OS is installed. Since we’re installing an OS today though, you’re going to want to select “USB Storage”, and move it to the top by pressing the F6 key.

14. Once you’re done, press F10 to save and exit. If you’re ready to dive straight into the install, make sure you have your prepped USB drive plugged in and ready to go.

15. Plug your computer in, if it’s not already. You don’t want your netbook to die halfway though — this will only lead to sadness.
Next time you boot, assuming you’ve got your flash drive plugged in, you should see this screen. You’ll see a spinning pinwheel for a few minutes; just leave it. Your computer is thinking.

16. HAHA, BEHOLD! This screen, it’s awfully Apple-y! But you’re not done yet. Let the install complete, following the prompts as you go. When it asks you where to install OS X, select and clear the entire HDD of your device. This will delete everything, so make sure you have your stuff backed up.

After about an hour, you’re done. Seriously — that’s it. Your first boot will take longer than normal, and your desktop may freeze for minutes at a time. Give it some time to figure everything out. Within about 10 minutes, your desktop should be ready to go.

Odds and Ends

By and large, your install should work out of the box. Sleep, shutdown/startup, sound, keyboard shortcuts, battery indicators and anything else you can think of should be present. One thing that’s immediately irritating, though, is the trackpad: it’s kinda shitty. Here’s what you need to do:

17. Go here, and download the attached trackpad driver.

18. Open Finder on your 10v, and press CMD+Shift+G (on this keyboard, that’s Alt+Shift+G.) In the box that comes up, typed “/Extra” and press enter. This will bring you to a hidden folder. Copy the .kept file you’ve download into the Mini10vExt folder, making sure to back up the one you’re replacing.

19. Run the app in the “Extra” directory called UpdateExtra, which will alert OS X to the new drivers. Restart your computer.

You should see, as you could before, a panel in the OS X preferences where you can adjust trackpad settings. Play with them as you like — two finger scrolling is great. The main difference with the new driver, though, is that it kills the bottom part of the trackpad, where the two buttons are supposed to be. This makes clicking and dragging, which was just about impossible before, work perfectly.

The only other issue you’re likely to run into is the occasional too-big settings screen. Here’s an obscenely clever workaround for that.

So There You Go

You’ve got yourself a fully-functioning, beautifully small Snow Leopard netbook, which’ll do 90 per cent of what a 13-inch MacBook can, at 70 per cent the size and about 25 per cent of the cost. Mine’s close to perfect: With an extended battery, I’m pushing seven hours of battery life with Wi-Fi, which makes my MacBook pro look like a LOSER. And tiny extra bit of size over the Mini 9 means the keyboard is just large enough to work on, meaning this thing isn’t just a toy — it’s a decent investment. This, from a guy with banana fingers.

Anyway, buckets of thanks to the DellMyMini forums, especially users MechDrew and Bmcclure937.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments — your feedback is a huge benefit to our how-to guides. Good luck with your own Hackintoshing!

Boot Camp, to be clear, is different from virtualisation software like Parallels or VM Ware Fusion or Virtual Box, which let you run Windows inside of OS X, almost like an application. Boot Camp runs Windows natively on a Mac — you power on, click the Windows icon at the boot manager, and it starts it up, just the same as if you’d powered on a Dell. Why Windows straight up on a Mac? To live a little. Or in my case, to play PC games.

What you’ll need

• A Windows 7 disc
• A Snow Leopard disc
• An Intel-based Mac
• Free disc space!

More on system requirements here.

It’s easy, probably

Boot Camp, and the process of installing Windows in most cases, couldn’t be more straightforward, at least as far as operating system installs usually go. After you’ve got your Mac up and running like normal, fire up an app called Boot Camp Assistant (just use Spotlight). It’ll warn you to back up your disk before installing Windows, which you should, since you are asking favours of the hard drive gods here.

Boot Camp Assistant will ask how much of your hard drive you wanna dedicate to Windows. You want more than the laughably small 5GB of space it suggests. Since I keep around 3-4 games on my Windows partition at a time, and I want some breathing room just in case, I stick with 40GB, but you probably really want no less than 20GB. Slide the bar toward the Finder face, granting Windows how much hard drive space you want it to have. After you click partition, Boot Camp Assistant will start getting your hard drive divvied up for some Windows action, which’ll take a few minutes. Once that’s done, you’ll need your Windows disk.

If everything went according to plan, skip this next section!

If something went wrong

It’s possible you’ll get an error that says Boot Camp Assistant wasn’t able to create the partition because some files couldn’t be moved, and you need to format the drive into a single partition. Basically, what’s happened here, most likely, is that your hard drive is fragmented like a mofo, and there’s not enough contiguous space for Boot Camp Assistant to create the Windows partition. Yeah, disk fragmentation. In OS X. Believe it. From here, there a couple possible solutions.

If you’re extraordinarily lucky, it’s possible you might be able to simply restart your computer and stuff will just work. Probably not! From there, you proceed to the free and easy solution. Using Disk Utility, resize your main OS X partition, reducing it by 40GB (or however much you plan on making your Windows partition). Hit apply, and pray. If that goes peachy, you’ll have 40GB of unused space on your disk. Go back to Disk Utility, and re-expand your OS X partition to reclaim the 40GB. After that’s all done, run Boot Camp Assistant again, and since the hard work of moving files around on the disk was done by Disk Utility, you should be golden.

If, on the other hand, Disk Utility also refused to change your drive’s partitions, you have two choices. The nuclear option is to back up, format your hard drive completely, then run Boot Camp and divide your hard drive into partitions from the Snow Leopard installation before restoring all of your OS X data via machine. Since my Snow Leopard install was practically virginal, as a totally clean (not restored) install that was only around 10 days old [ed. note—how the hell did your hard drive get so fragmented then?], I said screw that. Which led me to iDefrag.

It’s a $US30 defragmenting program. I don’t know if my hard drive was really as disgustingly fragmented as it said, or if it’ll ultimately help my Mac’s performance, but it perfectly executed what I bought it for. Basically, you make a startup DVD (using your Snow Leopard install disc, so keep it handy), boot into it, and it shows you how gross and fragmented your hard drive is before going to work defragging it for a couple hours. Restart, you’re back in OS X, and Boot Camp Assistant won’t talk back to you again. At least, it didn’t to me.

The part where you actually install Windows, so grab some tea

OK, welcome back, people without problems. After the partitioning is successful, Boot Camp Assistant will ask you to pop in your Windows disc. If you’ve got one of these Macs and 4GB of RAM, you should install the 64-bit version. If not, go 32-bit. Now, all of the pains and glories of installing Windows will actually commence.

After you pick the language and accept the terms, it’ll ask you want kind of Windows installation you want. Pick custom, and you should get a list of hard drives to install Windows on. Make sure you highlight the correct partition and click format, which will transform it to Windows’ native NTFS file system, if you’re doing a partition that’s bigger than 32GB for Windows. Then tell Windows to install itself there. Go make a drink, and come back 20 minutes later.

Welcome to Windows land.

Now what?

To pick between booting into OS X or Windows when you turn on your Mac, start holding down the Alt key before the grey screen appears when you power on. (You gotta be fast.) It’ll give you the option to boot into Mac or Windows. Pick Windows, obviously. Once you’re totally in Windows, like with the desktop and everything, you need to pop in the Snow Leopard installation disc, and run the Boot Camp installer, which puts in place all the drivers Windows needs to actually run decent on your Mac.

After that, you should run Windows Update to grab the latest goods from Microsoft, and I’d suggest, especially if you’re running a unibody MacBook (or Pro) going to Nvidia’s site and downloading their latest Windows 7 drivers for your graphics card (the 9M series for unibody MacBook Pros, 8M for the previous, non-unibody generation).

Overall, Boot Camp 3.0 in Snow Leopard works way better and more smoothly than before: Multitouch trackpads on MacBooks feel way less janky; shortcut keys, like for brightness or volume, work exactly like in OS X (before, you pressed the function key); and you can read your OS X partition’s files from Windows now. (Back in OS X, you won’t be able to write to your Windows partition if it’s the NTFS format.) By the way, the command key, by default, is mapped as the Windows key, so you’re probably gonna annoyingly bring up the start menu a whole bunch. It’s natural.

The word virtualization conjures images of the dank nerd lairs, populated by lonely network admins, scattered with miles of grey wire, grimy PC towers, processed food packaging and tiny tumbleweeds woven of human hair. It sounds like the domain of the software nerd, the Gentoo jockey, and most importantly, not you. Today, though, virtualisation has become amazingly easy, and fantastically useful.

Terminology aside, here’s what desktop virtualisation means today: You can run just about any OS, Mac OS X excluded, inside any other OS. Ubuntu in Mac OS? Sure. Windows 7 within Windows XP? Why not? Windows ME within Snow Leopard? Nobody’s going to stop you, I guess! And these patchy, half-assed experiment we’re talking about here—these are fully-functioning installations, which’ll connect to USB peripherals, access the internet, share files with your host OS, and run almost any software you could run on a native installation. You can set up as many of these things as you want, and delete them in a matter of seconds.

Best of all, virtualisation is now something you can try—and stick with—for free, thanks to software like Sun’s VirtualBox. It’s a free download on any platform, and it does its job spectacularly. Here’s how to get started.

What You’ll Need Free hard drive space: VirtualBox is going to create a simulated hard drive (a hard drive image, to be specific) inside your current OS’s operating system. In other words, you’ll need to have space handy to hold a standard OS install, plus whatever apps you’re planning on using on the host system. 10GB is enough to play around with in most cases.

Lots-o-RAM: As efficient as modern virtualization is, running one OS inside another isn’t going to be easy on your hardware. The easiest way to ensure good VM performance is to have plenty of RAM, such that both OSes—your host one and your guest one—can have more than their minimum recommended amount of RAM.

VirtualBox: This is the virtual machine, or the program in which all of your virtual OSes will run. Getting it is just a matter of downloading the correct version—there are Windows, Mac and Linux versions—and running an installation wizard.

A guest OS: Installing an OS as a virtual machine is almost exactly like installing an OS natively, albeit slightly easier. In other words, you’ll need a full, licensed version of your OS, in whatever form you can get it. Downloaded ISO images will work right out of the, er, box—this is how most Linux distributions will come packaged—while OSes on a CD will work too, including your Windows install discs. If applicable, you’ll still need to enter licence keys—as far as Microsoft is concerned, this is a fresh installation of an OS.

Installing Your Virtual Machine I’ve chosen to install Windows 7 within OS X Snow Leopard for this guide, because this will be a common usage scenario, and because the processing of installing an OS in VirtualBox is nearly the same no matter which software you’re running on either end. In other words, if you’re installing Ubuntu 9.04 within Windows XP, you can still follow along. Anyway, here you go:

Installing Guest Additions
VirtualBox supports so-called “Guest Additions” in some OSes, which are essentially sets of tools and drivers that make the virtualization more seamless. If they’re available, you’ll want to install them: the guest OS will adjust to your screen resolution properly, your video performance will be smoother (and in Windows XP and Vista, possible accelerated), filesharing will be simplified, copy and paste will work between OSes, and in some cases, you’ll even be able to run individual programs as native windows in your host OS, not just inside the cordoned-off virtual machine window.

If you’re running Windows inside Mac OS or Linux, you may as well try this. It’s not quite perfect—the Start Menu stacked atop the Dock is a little awkward—but at least this way you don’t have to alternate between desktops. It’s a cool effect, at the very least.

To install Guest Additions, click “Install Guest Additions” under the “Machine” menu while running your virtual machine. Guest Additions should appear in your guest OS as an optical disc, which should contain an installer. Run it, then restart your virtual machine. Once Guest Additions are installed, you can access Seamless Mode from the VirtualBox menu, under “Machine.”

Shared Directories
Copy and paste will often work between the host and guest OS, but if you’re planning on using your guest OS for productivity, or sharing media, a shared folder is the only real solution. In the bottom right corner of a running virtual machine, you should see a small folder icon. Clicking it will bring up a shared folder creation dialog. Select where on your host OS your shared folder should be—it can be an existing directory, like your “Music” folder, and check the box to make it “Permanent.” On your guest machine, the shared folder will show up as a VirtualBox Shared Folder in your local network.

Connecting USB Devices
One of the most common reasons for installing a virtual machine is to circumvent some kind of driver incompatibility. VirtualBox recognised most of your computer’s inbuilt components, like sound cards, extra storage or webcams, and can use them automatically. For most USB devices, though, you’ll need to tell it when to take control.

In most cases, this just means making sure your device isn’t in use by your host OS (a flash drive will need to be unmounted, for example), and clicking the small folder icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. This will bring up a list of available connected devices; simply click the one you want, and you’re good to go.

Odds and Ends Virtualising isn’t just a good way to get around some kind of nagging compatibility problem, it’s a fun way to wile away a few hours experimenting with weird news OSes. Setup is just about the same no matter what you’re installing, so there’s really no reason not to try some of the more esoteric software out there—anything with an ISO available for download will do. For a taste, try the Haiku Project—a revival of the long-dead BeOS, or see what the hell FreeBSD is.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy virtualising, folks.

And, even if you’d rather buy a pre-made box—built-in Time Machine support for Macs is a good reason to go with HP’s, for instance—they’ve got some essential add-ins and performance tweaks to get the most out of your Home Server. [Maximum PC]

Why Homebrew?

Paid apps are due in the official App Catalog any day now—actually they’re running a little late—meaning that the app selection is probably about to get a lot wider, and basically better. But webOS development is limited in scope, and App Catalog applications will never be able to theme your device, access 3D APIs that aren’t in the MojoSDK, change your homescreen layout, or add an onscreen keyboard. Pre homebrew is as much about adding apps that Palm has been so slow to approve as it is tweaking your handset. Think of it like jailbreaking an iPhone, except that it’s easier to do, and the benefits are much, much greater.

(This guide owes a huge debt to the PreCentral forums, where the developer of WebOS Quick Install, with others, have collected most of the necessary resources. Recognition is nice, but donations are better. If you find WebOS Quick Install useful, send Jason a few bucks.)

What You Need

Some downloads! The only app you’ll need to run on your computer is a Java app, so it’s completely cross-platform. This guide should work for Windows, Mac or Linux.

1. WebOS Quick Install:
This is the desktop program that effectively opens up your Pre for business. It’s got quite a bit of power on its own, but one of its greatest talents is the ability to install package managers like Preware, which make installing homebrew apps to your Pre, from your Pre super-easy.

2. WebOSDoctor ROM: This is just a restoration ROM for webOS, which WebOS Quick Install needs to work. It should be saved into the same directory as WebOS Quick Install, then left alone.

3. Java SE 6: Make sure you’ve got Java 1.6, or SE 6, so you can run these apps properly.

And one trick:

4. Dev Mode: Switching your Pre to dev mode is either sort of fun or sort of tedious, depending on your capacity for nostalgia.

All you have to do is type “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” on the keypad. That’ll open a search query that’ll uncover a new app on your Pre called “DeveloperMode.” Run it, and it’ll switch your phone into, you guessed it, developer mode.

Running WebOS Quick Install

5. Plug your Pre into your computer. When prompted for connection type, select “Just Charge”

6. Open WebOS Quick Install, making sure that the WebOSDoctor ROM is in the same directory as the Quick Install JAR.

You’ll get this message:

Heed it.

7. When you reopen WebOS Quick Install, you’ll be prompted to choose which kind of device you want to access. Choose “USB Device,” which’ll install the drivers necessary to crack into a physical Pre, not just an emulator.

8. Follow the driver installation prompts through to completion.

9. Open WebOS Quick Install again. You should see the app’s home screen. Click on the bottom button in the right panel, as indicated here:

10. Select “WebOS-Internals Feed (all)” from the download list. Select both “Package Manager Service” and “Preware” from the resulting list. These will enable you to download and apply the tweaks and apps you want.

11. After download, they will be added to the previously empty list in the app’s homescreen, where you should highlight both, then click “Install”

There you go!

Getting the Most Out Of Homebrew

Now that you’re set up and ready to go, it’s time to do stuff. Launch the Preware app on your Pre—at first load, it takes a while to sync up with all the repositories, so be patient—and explore the 200+ apps included by default. (You can add other repositories on your own, but most of the good stuff is already here.)

The “Package Manager Service” installation doesn’t just enable downloads through Preware — it enables a whole range of WebOS Quick Install tweaks, which you can access through the Tools ->Tweaks menu. WebOS Quick Install may prompt you to install a few patches; just go along with it, it’ll only take a second.

Once you’re in the panel, you’ll see a wealth of useful tweaks, from a 4-icon-wide app launcher, to a browser ad-blocker, to a user agent string changer, so your Pre asks for snazzier iPhone mobile pages instead of standard mobile fare. Generally, each tweak will restart your Pre.

Themes are managed either through Preware, which has a selection of over 200 that you can install with a single button press, or through the WebOS Quick Install menu, at Tools -> Themer. To install a new theme from WebOS Quick Install, you’ll have to manually download from an external site, which you’ll be directed to automatically. Once you’ve downloaded the theme, it’s just a matter of loading it into the app. Preware is probably your best bet for this, though there isn’t really a way to find out if a theme is any good without actually trying it.

As for that onscreen keyboard? You can install that through WebOS Quick Install: It’s in the same place you found Preware, in the “WebOS-Internals Feed (all)” section of the package downloader. A word of warning: It’s only officially supported up to WebOS 1.2.0, so you might be best advised to wait a few days until the developers have worked out any bugs with 1.2.1.

Anyway, the Pre Homebrew community is rich and fast-moving, so I’ll let you all take it from here. Some great resources to get you started:

• PreCentral
• WebOS-Internals
• PimpMyPre
• PreYourMind

And again, a gajillion thanks to WebOS Quick Install Developer Jason Robitaille and the users over at the PreCentral forums.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments. Happy homebrewing, folks!

First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it’ll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it’ll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that’ll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or now.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It’s not difficult, at all. Here’s what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we’re looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There’s plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max
From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can’t hurt. On top of all this, Max is also a great file converter, in case you’ve got some delinquent WMA files scattered around.

Windows: Exact Audio Copy
From the makers:

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are
• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

What this translates to: The best error correction money can buy, for free. Seriously: Audiophiles swear by exact audio copy, and with good reason. You’ll have to download your own LAME encoder before you can enable MP3 encoding in the program options, but you can do that right here without a problem. Additionally, setting up tagging, which you’ll definitely want to do, takes an extra, albeit easy, step.

If you want to take a simpler route you can just download CDex, which supports LAME and tagging databases out of the box, and produces results nearly as good as—if not as good as—Exact Audio Copy.

On both platforms, you’re going to have a lot of personal decisions to make. How do you want to organise your files? How do you want to name them? Unlike iTunes, these apps don’t pressure your to store your music in a certain way—it’s up to you to archive as you please. Both offer plenty of options for storage and organisation, easily available in their Preferences menus:
As I said, this one’s up to you.

Choose Your File Type MP3: If you’re encoding only for portable devices, not concerned about archiving perfect copies of your music, hate hate hate audiophiles, think FLAC and OGG just sound like gurgling baby noises, you’re probably going to want to stick with MP3s. Yes, there are other formats that offer a better size-to-sound ratio, and no, it’s not open source or anything, but for pure compatibility, control and encoder choice, it’s hard—no, impossible—to beat MP3. And if you set up your encoder correctly, MP3s can sound great.

It’s tough to pick the optimal MP3 bitrate on your own, since at a certain point, differences in sound quality seem to come down as much to psychological factors as to actual clarity. Thankfully, we’ve crowd-sourced this issue and come up with a rough guide: 256kbps is, it seems, where people just can’t really tell the difference. In practical terms, this means setting your encoder to these settings:
That’s no higher than 256kbps VBR—for variable bitrate, which modifies the amount of information in your file’s stream according to how much is needed, and saves you space without sacrificing quality—with the highest (read: slowest) available encoding option. For almost everyone, in almost all circumstances, this’ll do, and it sure beats iTunes default 160kbps constant bitrate rips.

FLAC: If archiving is your intention—as in, digitising your music without losing any quality, no matter how imperceptible—then you’re going to want to go lossless. And of the lossless formats, FLAC is the most well-supported in terms of software and hardware, albeit not on any of Apple’s products—though iTunes can be made to play nice with FLAC with a few simple tweaks.

But don’t fret! The beauty of FLAC music is that it can be converted to other lossless formats, like Apple’s iPod-compatible Apple Lossless, without losing any quality, or compressed into MP3s without having to worry about muddy transcoding. Think of them as CDs without the physical disc, basically.

Embed Your Album Art

This is something else that iTunes doesn’t do right: album art. Sure, it’ll find it, but when you transfer all your music to a non-iPod music player, your art is gone. Why? It’s because iTunes stores the album art in a separate database, rather than in the song file’s ID3 tags, where it should be. On Mac OS, assuming you’re doing your listening in iTunes, which is pretty handy at fetching album art, you can just use one of Doug’s famous iTunes scripts to write said album art directly to your MP3 files. Here’s how you install it:

To install the files/folders, drag the items in the disc image window to your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. If there is no folder named “Scripts” there, create one and drag the files into it. AppleScripts placed in this folder will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. You do not have to install the .rtf/.rtfd documentation file in the “Scripts” folder, but it’s as convenient a place as any.

For Windows users, Lifehacker’s written a fantastic guide to collecting and embedding album art, which you should definitely read. The short version? Download MediaMonkey, and let it do the work for you.

Granted, once you embed album art into your files, apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player might not display it, and may ask you to search for it from their databases. This is fine: Both programs use proprietary album art storage systems, so just because they can’t see your ID3 tag album art doesn’t mean it’s not there, or that you shouldn’t have embedded it—having it around can’t hurt, and it’s by far the most compatible and rational method for storing album art, as far as other software, most MP3 players and long-term storage go.

Anyway, that’s it! Now you can set your CDs aside comfortably, knowing that you’ve squeezed the purest, most delicious audio files you can out of them. Now:

Listen to Your Music

Because that was the whole point.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop them in the comments. Happy ripping, folks!

When your concerned friends and family tell you that you have to back your data up, they’re effectively telling you two things: That backing up your data will save you a massive headache in the future, because more likely the not, your hard drive will fail; and, less bluntly, that you need to buy a hard drive. And who wants to do that? It’s hard to lay out the cash for a backup hard drive, since the payoff is uncertain, and (hopefully) far away.

The good news is, most of us cheapskates can still keep our most important files safe without spending a dime, or wasting more than a few minutes. Here how:

Note: These methods aren’t traditional, full backups—these are ways to keep copies of the files that matter most to you, like your documents, photos, music and videos.

Share
Do you live with someone else? Do you share a network with someone else? Then hey, you’ve got an inbuilt backup system right there! There are a few ways to deal with this setup, from stupid-simple to moderately complex.

First, you need permission. Whoever your networked buddy is, sit them down and have a talk. Give them a glass of milk, and explain to them how important data backup is. Persuade them. Coax them. Scare them. Offer to store their backups in exchange for them storing yours. Great! Now you have a partner in backuppery.

The easiest, most direct and least intimidating way to get free backups is to set up simple file sharing on your PC or Mac. On the PC, it’s just a matter of ticking a few boxes and setting a few parameters (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7) and on Mac, it’s not much harder (To another Mac, to a PC, courtesy of Lifehacker).

Now you need to decide what to back up, and how to do it. If privacy isn’t an issue, like in a scenario where you’re just syncing files between two open access family computers, you can simple copy your documents, photos, video and audio to opposing computers’ shared folders, and voila. If privacy is an issue, like if you’re trying to back up sensitive documents or embarrassing photos, you can simply create a password-protected archive of some or all of your data, then copy that over to the folder.

But this is all a little manual for my taste—for a longer term solution, I’d recommend something a little more automated. All we need with such a simple setup is a basic backup utility. For Windows, I’ve been happy with IdleBackup, a free little utility that’ll backup selected folders to any destination you want—including network folders—while your computer isn’t working, or on a schedule. For Mac, Lacie’s SilverKeeper is as simple and powerful a tool as you’ll need, syncing folders locally or over a network on a set schedule—also free.

Go Online Again, short of purchasing a whole lot of online space especially designed for the purpose of storing full backups, this’ll be a scenario in which you’re picking a choosing what you save and what you don’t; you intention here is to protect the files that matter most, not your entire operating system. Luckily, with increasingly generous offers from online storage companies, you can put quite a bit of your stuff on someone else’s servers for nothing. A few of the best:

Windows Live Skydrive: This one really deserve more publicity that it seems to get, because it hands you 25GB of no-strings storage, completely for free. The 50MB filesize limit is a little low considering how large your online disk is, but for document, photo, and even music backup, it’s hard to beat this.

File Factory: 100GB of free storage with a 300MB file limit. The catch? It can be a little slow, so this much data isn’t necessarily that usable.

Dropbox: This is more than just a backup service—it has plenty of nifty file syncing and features, too—but it’s a super-simple way to store 2GB of data online, with well-designed clients on every major platform

Mozy: Gives you 2GB of storage for free, or an unlimited amount for $US5 a month. Comes with an extremely handy Windows utility that makes it easy to specify what gets uploaded, and what doesn’t.

Orbit Files: Offers 6GB of space, but with fewer options available for non-paying customers, and no software client.

Scatter Yourself In the Cloud The bad news is, this is the most time-consumer way to skirt proper backups, both in terms of setup and recovery. The good news is, you’re probably already doing this, to an extent.

If my laptop died right now, I’d lose my settings, a little bit of music, a few day’s worth of documents, and well, that’s about it. That’s because so, so much of my data lives online, just by nature of how I work. Rather than undertaking a day-long effort to upload all your files to myriad online services, just consider changing your habits a little, and easing into a cloud over time. That these services provide useful backups is incidental—usually they’re intended as web apps—but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve the purpose beautifully.

Documents:

Google Docs: This one’s a no-brainer, since a lot of you probably already use Gmail, with which Docs is tightly integrated. It can change formatting in files, but at least you won’t lose data.

Office Live: Microsoft’s take on the online office suite comes with a free 5GB, which, let’s be honest, is an awful lot of Word documents.

Zoho: As an online office suite, Zoho offers a few little features that Google and Microsoft don’t. As a storage service, though, they only offer 1GB. Still!

Photos:

Flickr: The obvious choice for photography geeks, Flickr give you unlimited storage for free, at a rate of 100MB a month.

Snapfish: With fewer options for enthusiasts, Snapfish’s draw is its unlimited storage and orderable photo prints.

Picasa: 1GB of Google’s storage space for free out of the box, with a nice client to boot.

Photobucket:

Facebook: This might seem like an unlikely recommendation, but they’ve got one of the best deals going, in a way. If you’re not concerned about the quality of your photo uploads—like, you just want them for onscreen viewing—you can upload unlimited photos here, 200 at a time. And in any case, a medium-quality JPEG is better than no photo at all.

Music:

MP3Tunes: Puts your music library everywhere, with a bevy of client apps for various platforms, including the iPhone. 2GB of free storage isn’t much, but it’s something.

File Factory: Mentioned above in the general storage section, FileFactory also has a web interface for music. 100GB is quite possibly enough to store your whole library.

Deezer: A French music streaming service that also lets you upload as much music as you’d like, for personal use.

Video:

This is the most hackish of the bunch, but YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and the like usually support private or invite-only videos, which means they can act as last resort backup solutions, though the loss of quality and long upload times might make these plans a little unwieldy.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments. Happy data-hoarding, and have a great weekend!

Here’s the rub about making coffee: The best ways to make coffee are the super simplest or the ultra-geekiest. The middle ground—i.e., your drip brewer—produces mediocrity. And where I come from, mediocre is spelled s-h-i-t-t-y. What’s universal to every good method of making coffee is that there’s a ton of control and consistency going on. In fact, consistency is the secret sauce to making great coffee. But we’ve got a few things we even get to the part you probably think of as “making coffee.” These are the basic elements, no matter what voodoo you’re invoking to make coffee: the beans, roast, grind, dose, water, temperature and brew time.

Beans

Buy ‘em fresh, buy ‘em whole, buy ‘em sustainably. That’s about all there is to it. Well, almost. If you’re a dark roast drinker, it’s time to branch out. Here’s how Ken Nye, owner of Ninth St. Espresso, which has been at the forefront of NYC’s coffee scene since 2001 explains it like this: Take a piece of dry-aged prime rib, which is loaded with complex flavors. How are you gonna cook it? Lighter, to preserve all of that complexity, or are you gonna char the holy hell out of it? There’s nothing wrong with people who like the taste of a well-done piece of meat, but well, they’re loving the char more than the meat. Same thing with some of the amazing coffees people that are being sourced now by companies like Intelligentsia, Stumptown and Counter Culture—they tend to roast on the medium to lighter side using older equipment to let the coffee’s actual flavor come through. Roasting super dark is a good way to hide what’s going on with the bean (good or bad).

Grinding

There’s no way around this: If you care about coffee, you have to grind the beans right before you make it. As soon as they’re ground, the oils inside the beans are exposed to air, and the thousand different flavor compounds inside start dying. Coffee’s fragile, man.

The grind is the foundation process for everything else that happens afterward. In fact, David Latourell, formerly of the Coffee Equipment Company (of Clover fame) and currently at Intelligentsia, says that the number one thing people can do to “change their world” when it comes to coffee is to fix their grind situation. If the grind up is screwed, so is everything else. Uniformity is what’s key, otherwise you get an uneven extraction, which means mediocre coffee. And the only way to get that uniformity is with a good burr grinder.

Blade grinders mutilate coffee beans, and the heat caused by the friction screws up the chemistry, so don’t even think about it. A burr grinder pulverizes the beans instead of chopping them up. Just because it’s a burr grinder doesn’t mean it’s a good grinder, though. You want one that’s efficient and can grind slowly, otherwise you’re introducing friction and heat that corrupts the coffee. Typically, that means a conical burr grinder, versus a flat burr grinder. While you can get a burr grinder as cheaply as $US50, both Ken and David say that you have to spend at least $US150-$US200 for a home grinder—in particular, David recommends the Baratza Virtuoso, a conical burr grinder that’s about $US200. (Ken’s commercial grinder, pictured, is about $US3000.) It sounds like a crazy amount of money for a grinder, but if you’re serious about making coffee at home, this is where you start. Fortunately, it’s the most expensive piece of equipment you need to buy.

Okay! Let’s get to brewing, from simple to whizbang.

Chemex

A Chemex pot is one of the simplest ways to brew coffee. Seriously. You put a paper filter over a carafe, dump in coffee grounds, and pour water over it. There is an art to it, however. As is the case with every method of making coffee, there’s no one perfect dose, brew time or temperature for every coffee—it depends on the coffee, and of course, your taste, and that’s where the art lies—but Intelligentsia’s got some starting points (PDF). (90C is a good fail-safe temp, though.) Intelligentsia’s got a tutorial video ready to go. Besides the $US35 Chemex pot, you need Chemex brand paper filters (no, the cheap filters won’t do, because the paper weave sucks). Something to look for is a nice, even bloom, like we see up top (the coffee will puff up in the filter) as you pour. The end result is a light, super clean cup of coffee where all of its qualities shine through really brightly.

French Press

The French press, while low tech like the Chemex, produces coffee that’s almost antithetical to the Chemex’s clean profile: It’s got more heft, it’s grittier, it’s a little less defined, but it’s much richer, too. A solid Bodum press starts at about $US30, give or take. The coffee is ground a little coarser here, for bigger particulates. Happily, there’s another video to walk you through the process. Two things to emphasise, Ken from Ninth St. says: When you push down the plunger at the end of the brew time, go slow and easy. As coffee steeps longer, it gets more sensitive, so you don’t want to agitate it by slamming down the plunger. Also, when you’re done brewing, pour off all the coffee. Don’t let it sit, you gotta get it outta there. (Image via jilliansvoice/Flickr)

Vacuum or Siphon Pot

The vacuum pot looks like it’s straight out of a chemistry set for a reason: You don’t wanna go there. David explains that it’s perhaps the finickiest way to brew coffee—it “requires skill” and an amazing cup out of it can be “elusive.” It is a seriously cool concept though. So, you’ve got two chambers connected by a tube. Water is boiled in the bottom chamber so it rises into the upper chamber, where your coffee is hanging out. It brews. Then you pull it off the heat source (whatever you’re using), and the coffee is sucked back into the lower chamber—vacuums, baby—leaving the grounds up top and an articulate, clean cup in the bottom.

Moka Pot

Then there’s the Moka pot. What makes it special is that it uses steam pressure to brew coffee, and you make it on your stove, using coffee that’s almost as finely ground as espresso, though not quite. Again, pretty simple idea with a couple of chambers connected by a tube. You’ve got a base chamber, filled with water, into which you stick a funnel-shaped filter filled with coffee. Start the water a-boilin’ and steam pressure will start forcing through the filter (and the coffee grounds, natch) into the upper chamber. So it’s sort of like a percolator, and there’s debate as to whether or not it’s a true perc pot because of the way it uses steam pressure. You’ve got to take care not to let things get too hot, though, otherwise you’ll screw up the coffee. Gimme Coffee’s tutorial for making Moka Pot coffee is a pretty solid one to follow, and pots go from $US25-$US50, depending on size. (kanaka/Flickr)

Cold Brew or Toddy

Haven’t heard of cold-brewing? This is how you make iced coffee, not pouring coffee you’ve brewed regularly over ice, which results in a sour, disgusting abomination. Well, every method we’ve talked about (and will after this) for brewing coffee involves hot water, and a relatively short brewing time. Cold brewing is the low and slow approach: Coarse coffee grounds are steeped in room temp water for 12-24 hours, depending on the coffee. What comes out is exceptionally smooth, with most of the acidity—and some would say complexity—gone, so it has drinkability, like Bud Light. The “official” and I suppose easiest way to make cold-brew coffee is using the $US40 toddy system, which claims credit for starting the whole damn cold-brew deal in the first, but you can make it on the cheap.

Drip

Okay, I’m about to explode your world here. The drip coffeemaker you’ve got at home and at your office on the left here? It sucks. Remember earlier, how I said consistency is the key to coffee? A consistent temperature is crucial, and most drip makers can’t deliver that. They can’t even deliver the right temperature to begin with. The golden temperature for brewing coffee is 93C, and most drip pots top out at around 82C, which isn’t hot enough for a proper extraction. Plus, they probably wet the grinds unevenly, making it worse. In fact, Ken and David both say that the only drip brewer who can deliver that is from Technivorm (on the right), whose drip brewers actually meet the temperature standards of the Special Coffee Association of America. And Technivorms coffeemakers aren’t cheap, going for around $US200. Sorry dudes.

Espresso

You know what? Let’s just get this out of the way: You can’t make amazing espresso at home. Not unless you’re will to spend something $US7500 on an espresso machine from someone like La Marzocco. Why? Consistency. Temperature. Pressure.

As big and scary as an espresso machine looks, again, the basics aren’t too complicated to grasp: It’s using pressure to force water through a puck of finely ground coffee. What’s inside that giant box is a boiler system—or two—that heats the water that passes through the puck and powers the steamer, and a motor to force the water through with a degree of pressure, so that the coffee is quickly extracted with all of those “beautiful oils” Ken from Ninth St. is fond of talking about, if the espresso shot is pulled skilfully. It should be dense, rich and topped with a yummy looking rust foam on top, called crema.

Lesser machines aren’t that good at the two most important things an espresso machine works with: Temperature and pressure. To start, good commercial machines have at least two independent boiler systems, one for the coffee, one for the steamer. In the past, Jacob Ellul-Blake from La Marzocco R&D told me, before the brew boiler and steam boiler were separated, you ran into a problem where steaming milk would cause the steam pressure inside of the machine to drop, which would make the water temperature drop as well, since temperature and pressure are proportional—and you’d get a less-than-excellent shot. So, a good machine keeps a consistent temperature. Incredibly high end machines are super-precisely controlled temp-wise, within tenths of a degree. That’s because taste is affected with a temperature variation of half a degree. (We’ll go more in-depth on that later this week.) On the pressure front, most home machines just can’t deliver the 8-9 bar of pressure that you need for a good extraction.

So when it comes to espresso, if you desire excellence, you’re pretty much resigned to going to a coffee shop. They’ve got the equipment—and hopefully barista skills—you just don’t have. But that’s not a bad thing. David related it this way: It’s like the difference between cooking at home and eating out. You can make a delicious meal yourself (coffee analog: Chemex or French press) but you’re probably not going to make cookie-covered ice cream balls using liquid nitrogen, and that’s okay.

Clover Clover was the darling of the coffee world until the Coffee Equipment Company was bought by Starbucks. All hand-built, around 250 of them were made before Starbucks swooped in. Essentially, the Clover is a nerdy way of delivering water to coffee with precisely—digitally—controlled parameters that are repeatable every single time, so you can brew the same cup over and over and over, or so you can experiment more rigorously, carefully tweaking one element at a time.

The gist of the Clover of this: You place ground coffee in a chamber, which is filled with a precise amount of water at the exact temperature you set (give or take a degree) for the precise brew time you set. When it’s done. Coffee pulled into the chamber by the vacuum formed when the piston is pushed back up with the Clover’s powerful motor—it can lift 350 pounds—with the grounds left on top thanks to its 70 micron filter. The resulting cup is clean—coffee aficianados love clean cups—and expressive, though it’s not quite so as the Chemex method. But that’s what $US12,000 of coffee engineering gets you.

That’s not quite every method of brewing coffee—seriously, there’s about a million, like CafeSolo or single-cup ceramic drip—but those are the majors definitely worth knowing (or in one case, forgetting). If you wanna get really geeky about coffee, believe me, we haven’t even started, so stayed tuned.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee or coffee to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Taste Test is our week-long tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.