If you like to find new ways to tweak OS X, you sometimes need to look in unexpected places. For example, the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, which houses a number of features to help users who have limited seeing, hearing, and mobility, contains some nifty features that all users should know about. Here are five system tweaks that you might want to try on your Mac.

1. Change the cursor size

If you mirror your Mac’s display to a large-screen TV or use a large (or especially high-resolution) monitor, you may find that the cursor on your screen is too small. You can change the size of the cursor, and make it anywhere from big to huge.

Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences, click Accessibility, and then click Display. Drag the Cursor Size slider from Normal (smallest) toward Large, settling on the size you want to use; the cursor changes size as you drag the slider.

This setting will change the standard mouse pointer, as well as other cursors (the text input cursor, for example), though it won’t work in all applications. It will even make the hand pointer, which displays when you hover over a link in Safari, much larger.

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Keeping up with just one social media account is tough enough. But if you personally hang out on even one or two more services, or are in charge of socializing with your business’s customers online, juggling it all starts to feel a lot more like work, and not the fun kind. Here are a few tools and tricks—some for power users, others for business cases, and even a slightly nerdier option—that can help take the drudgery out of managing social media.

Get started posting with OS X

Depending on your needs, there is, of course, always OS X itself. As of Mountain Lion, Apple added some much-needed integration of a handful of social media accounts right into OS X. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences and select Mail, Contacts, & Calendars. Here, you can add multiple Twitter accounts, one Facebook account, and Yahoo, Vimeo, and Flickr accounts.

OS X’s social media integration mostly makes the process of sharing out to your accounts much easier. If you mostly just need to post status updates, links, and media, having these tools built into most of your apps and even having the good ol’ fashioned right-click menu can simplify a lot of your social tasks.

Try Tweetbot for heavy tweeting

But what if your needs are greater, as they might well be if you’re using social media for both work and play? In addition to your personal Twitter account, you may have another for your blog or business, a parody account for your favorite TV character or meme, and more. If logging in and out of each account at Twitter.com is getting dizzying, give Tapbot’s $20 Tweetbot for Mac a try.

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When you’re working in a deeply nested folder (a folder within a folder within…), the Finder provides several options for moving back up through the hierarchy. But only one option provides both at-a-glance info and powerful shortcuts for working with files: the Path Bar.

Open a Finder window (Finder > New Finder Window) and then choose View > Show Path Bar. The Path Bar appears at the bottom of all your Finder windows, showing the complete path from your computer to the current folder. (A path is the series of subfolders that leads to a specific folder or file.)

This is the only way you can see a folder’s path when a Finder window is in the background, but that’s merely the most obvious of the conveniences the Path Bar provides.

1. Access folders in the path

Is the path too long for its folder names to show? Just point—no clicking necessary—to a truncated name, and it expands so that you can read it. This point-and-expand technique works even on background windows, whether you’re in the Finder or in another app. Double-click a folder in the Path Bar to see its contents in the current window. Or, open a folder into a separate window with a Command-double-click on its miniature in the Path Bar.

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Rapidly rotate an image

In the Windows OS, you can right-click on an image and choose a Rotate command. The Mac OS lacks such a feature, but you can produce something darned close with Automator.

Launch Automator (in your /Applications folder) and in the template chooser that appears choose Service. Click Choose. In the resulting workflow window, configure the pop-up menus at the top of the window to read Service receives no input in any application.

Select the Files & Folders library and drag the Get Selected Finder Items and Copy Finder Items actions into the workflow area (in that order). Now select the Photos library and add the Rotate Images action to the workflow. Create a new folder on the desktop and call it Rotated Images. Drag that folder to the Copy Finder Items pop-up menu. In the Rotate Images action, choose the kind of rotation you want the workflow to perform—left, right, or 180 degrees. Save the workflow (File > Save) and give it an intuitive name such as Rotate.

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We’re all interested in saving energy. Maybe you conserve to be a better global citizen or to save money on your utility bills. Maybe you use your laptop on the go and want to squeeze every possible minute of battery life out of it. But what if the daily computing practices you follow to save energy end up wasting it instead? What if your assumptions about Mac power usage are wrong? To investigate this possibility, Macworld’s lab compiled a list of eight widely held opinions about energy conservation, grabbed our trusty power meters, and started logging power usage.

We used two systems: a 2011 21-inch iMac and a 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro. We connected them to a Watt’s Up Pro power meter equipped with a USB connection that allowed us to capture energy usage logs while we ran various tests. Here’s what we found out.

1. ‘Laptops use less energy than desktops.’

The iMac we tested averaged around 83W with the screen set to full brightness, and with Bluetooth and WiFi enabled. That’s six times more than the 13.4W that the MacBook Pro drew at similar settings when fully charged. When the MacBook Pro’s battery was at a 50 percent charge and plugged in, however, our 15-inch laptop drew 80W, just about the same as the iMac.

Takeaway: Over the course of a day, laptops do use less energy than desktops.

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As of the Mountain Lion version, Apple’s Mail is better than ever at helping you manage your email. And Google’s Web-based Gmail is also pretty good—but how do you combine the two in just the right way so as to get the best of both?

The answer is simple—follow my guide below, wherein I describe my favorite way to balance a few features and compromises to make Mail and OS X work best with the Gmail Way.

Step 1: Enable IMAP

The first step to getting OS X’s Mail to work well with Gmail is to enable IMAP access. This will not only let Mail check your Gmail messages, but also keep everything in sync between your devices and the Web.

Log in to Gmail in a desktop Web browser, and click the gear icon on the right of the page, just below your Google Account avatar. In the menu that appears, choose Settings. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. About halfway down the page in the IMAP Access section, select Enable IMAP. Click Save at the bottom of the page.

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As a doctor, educator, and administrator, I attend a lot of meetings. That means taking lots of meeting notes and, after those meetings are over, making sure that all of the action items we’ve decided on get done. Over the years, I’ve tried many different ways to do so.

For ages, I regularly hauled my MacBook Pro along with me, and relied on a variety of apps to capture notes and to-dos. Next, I transitioned to taking handwritten notes with the Livescribe Echo smartpen; that pen translated my scrawl into computer-readable graphics. But—true to the physician stereotype—I have awful handwriting, and my notes were illegible. To make matters worse, that workflow offered me no good way to hand over my action items to OmniFocus, my task manager of choice.

Finally I hit upon an effective workflow: Using an iPad coupled with a Zagg Folio keyboard, I take notes that are immediately available on all my other devices in a format I can search quickly, and to-do items get into OmniFocus almost seamlessly. Here’s how it works.

Taking notes

For starters, I have two note-taking apps on the iPad (and iPhone): Drafts and Notesy.

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Backing up your data is the most important thing you can do with your computer—even more important than tweeting or posting on Facebook. If you don’t back up your Mac regularly, you may lose those photos that you want to share; you may find that your latest holiday videos are missing; and your music library may go poof!

Time Machine is a great tool for ensuring that your data is safe, and it’s pretty easy to set up and use. But for some users, the basic Time Machine interface isn’t enough. As with most of OS X’s functions, there is a command-line tool that lets you do many things with Time Machine. Here’s how you can use the tmutil command to control and tweak Time Machine from Apple's command-line tool, Terminal.

The basics

Most people won’t need to use this command for their backups because the Time Machine interface will suffice. Who will need it? People who want to manage remote Macs or who want to run scripts containing commands for Time Machine.

The basics of the tmutil command can be found by typing man tmutil in Terminal. (You'll find the Terminal app in your /Applications/Utilities folder.) The man page tells you what you can do with this command.

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Feel like shopping? Both the Mac App Store (Apple menu > App Store) and the iTunes Store (accessed through Apple’s iTunes) may appear to be applications, but they are actually websites. That means you don’t have to fumble through menus or wait for iTunes to launch in order to access the stores. It also means that you can use powerful Web-based tools—like Google search—to find apps, music, movies, and more. Here are six tips for using a Web browser to access the stores more quickly and efficiently.

1. Search from the Web

When you want to search the Mac App Store and iTunes Store apps, the limitations can be frustrating. For example, iTunes doesn’t let you search for record labels. If you’re looking for a song that’s been covered by 100 bands that makes it hard to find the version you want. Try Google to search instead.

Harness the power of Google: Say you want to find all the albums by a certain artist that are available in the U.S. iTunes Store. In your Web browser, type in a Google search such as this: Grateful Dead site:itunes.apple.com/us/

This search string has four parts. The first, Grateful Dead, is what I’m searching for. In the second part, site: specifies that the search is limited to the domain following the colon. The third, itunes.apple.com is the actual domain where the search will take place. (Both the App Store and the iTunes Store use the same URL.) Finally, the /us/ part at the very end limits the search to the United States stores. If you want to search in France, use /fr/; in the United Kingdom, use /gb/; and so on. (If you don’t know the two-letter code for your country, see this Wikipedia article. Naturally, not all countries have the iTunes Store or the Mac App Store.)

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It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it: find overlooked OS X tricks. Sometimes I hunt for them; sometimes I just run across them. Here’s a collection that I bet includes items you’ve missed, too.

1. Force Quit the current app

Pressing Shift before or after opening the Apple menu changes the Force Quit command to Force Quit [Current Application]. By reflex, I’ve always pressed Command-Option-Escape, selected the frozen app in the dialog box if necessary, clicked the Force Quit button, clicked the confirming dialog box, and then closed the window. But now I’ll use this menu trick to save myself those extra steps.

The menu shows a keyboard shortcut for force quitting the current application. But don’t get too excited: I’ve tried the shortcut on five different computers in Lion and Mountain Lion to no avail. Only choosing from the menu works.

2. Take a break from notifications

Want some temporary relief from those helpful, yet intrusive, notifications from Apple's Mail, Calendar, Reminders, and other apps? You don’t have to turn each one off through System Preferences, because there’s a hidden On/Off button.

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You love your iPad, and chances are good that you need to use Microsoft Office for work. You have lots of options for editing documents created in Microsoft Word and Excel on your iPad, but what about the third major component of Microsoft Office, PowerPoint ()?

If you need only view a PowerPoint document, you can use almost any iOS app that displays documents (including Apple’s Mail and Safari). iOS can natively display, though not edit, PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx) documents—but it shows them as a continuous scroll rather than as individual slides. You also won’t be able to see any animations, builds, transitions, or other special features. For displaying an existing PowerPoint presentation, a better choice is the free SlideShark app, which preserves most major PowerPoint features but still doesn’t allow editing.

When you need to edit a PowerPoint presentation or create a new one from scratch, your alternatives fall into three main categories: Keynote, a third-party office suite, or a virtual copy of PowerPoint for Windows.

Use Keynote

Apple’s $10 Keynote for iOS () is a fine tool for creating, editing, and displaying presentations. This version doesn’t have all the features of the desktop version of Keynote (), and if you import a presentation (whether created in Keynote on OS X or in PowerPoint), you may lose some important content. Say good-bye to fonts, transitions, and builds that aren’t available on the iPad, as well as audio and more. Even so, using Keynote is arguably the best way to edit a PowerPoint presentation on an iPad, because the app offers more powerful editing tools than any other native iPad presentation app does, and it has a better touchscreen interface than a virtual copy of Microsoft PowerPoint.

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As I’ve outlined over the many years we’ve produced these Automator tips, this fine utility can be used in powerful ways to make your work easier. However, in the hands of the office prankster it can also be used as a useful tool on the first day of April.

The following workflows require that you have access to your target’s Mac and user account. No one but a fool would leave their Mac open in such a way, but finding such fools is exactly what April Fools' Day is all about, right?

The devious desktop

Automator allows you to choose any image you like and use it as a desktop pattern. Feel free to click on the image below to expand it to its full size. Click on the image and then drag it to your desktop to save it. If that doesn't work, Control-click (or right-click) on the original image in this story and select Open Link In Window. Drag and click from there.

Plant that image in a not-entirely-obvious place on your victim’s Mac. Launch Automator (in /Applications) and in the template chooser that appears, select Application and click Choose. In the Finder, drag this image file into the workflow area. This creates a Get Specified Finder Items action that points to the image.

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Spring comes with its own rituals. Here at Macworld, we like to throw open the windows, beat the dust out of the rugs, and straighten up our Mac desktops. Don’t stop at cleaning your home this season—these tips from our editors will help you keep your Mac fresh and organized, too.

1. Tidy up your desktop

Last year I discovered Light Pillar’s wonderful app Desktop Tidy ($5; ). This handy utility cleans up your Mac’s desktop, keeping it free of clutter. It stores all desktop files and folders in a hidden Shadow Desktop, which you can access from the menu bar or in the Finder. That way, every file I download, each screenshot I capture, and every image I drag and drop to my desktop is stored and filed in an easy-to-reach location. The utility quietly works its magic at scheduled intervals—as often as every minute or as infrequently as every seven days. It even organizes desktop items by file type, which makes finding and renaming files easy.—Leah Yamshon

2. Delete unnecessary disk images

For most people, the Downloads folder is a dumping ground where files pile up in forgotten heaps. Go to the Downloads folder in the Finder and type disk image into the search box. Select Disk Image under the Kinds header. Now, delete all of those downloaded DMG files that are just taking up space!—Jason Snell

3. Empty out space-hogging Mail Downloads

As part of my job, I get quite a few attachments via email—PDFs, ePub ebooks, Word documents, images, you name it. Most of the time I save those files to my desktop or my Downloads folder, but on occasion I make the mistake of double-clicking a file. When you do that, the document saves itself to your Mail Downloads folder, hidden away in your Library file. Double-click enough files, and that folder can balloon in size. That’s why I make sure to check it and empty it every year or so.

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Your Mac has begun showing signs of trouble. Perhaps you frequently get errors when trying to open or save files. You suspect a problem with the hard drive. Before panic sets in, you want to launch Apple's Disk Utility and select Repair Disk from the First Aid tab. Hopefully, that will remedy the situation. One problem though: Repair Disk is dimmed and you can't select it. Why? Because OS X cannot attempt repairs on an active startup drive. You can still use Repair Permissions, which may help in certain situations. But let’s assume it doesn’t.

So what do you do instead? That depends on what Macs you own, how you have set them up, and what other precautions you may have taken prior to the start of the trouble.

First things first, if you don’t have a recent backup, make one now. But be careful. At this point, you don’t want to overwrite an existing backup—lest you replace valid data with corrupted data. Instead, back up to a separate drive. When you’re done backing up, here are the things to try. You can try each method until you find one that works:

Boot from the startup drive’s Recovery HD partition

The startup drives of Macs formatted with OS X 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion) typically have a hidden partition designed just for moments like this. This 650MB partition is called Recovery HD. Boot your Mac from Recovery HD by holding down Command-R at startup (or by choosing it from within Startup Manager, which you access by holding down Option at startup).

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When hard-drive disaster strikes, you need to start up your Mac from another drive to repair it. In days gone by, you would typically boot from the install CD or DVD that came with your Mac (assuming you could recall where you stashed it) and run Apple’s Disk Utility from there. But today’s Macs no longer ship with any optical disc—heck, most Macs ship without any optical drive. So what do you do instead? Your best bet is to prepare ahead.

Create an emergency flash drive

An emergency drive contains only the essential software you need to boot your Mac and run troubleshooting utilities (such as Apple’s Disk Utility). I recommend using a USB flash drive (8GB is sufficient) rather than an optical disc. Flash drives are superior because they work with Macs that no longer contain an optical drive, and you can update them as necessary.

The Recovery Disk Assistant method: One way to create your own emergency drive is via Apple’s Recovery Disk Assistant. This tool is simple to use, but requires that you already have a dedicated partition on your Mac’s hard drive called Recovery HD. If you installed Lion or Mountain Lion on a supported hard-drive configuration (your Mac must have an internal drive formatted with a GUID partition scheme), chances are good that it’s there.

You can check to see if you have the partition by restarting your Mac and then holding down Command-R. Or, restart while holding down the Option key. A screen should appear with Recovery HD as one of your options.

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Most of us know at least one person who’s not merely a Mac user, but a dyed-in-the-wool Mac geek. You know the type: someone who has a large collection of Macs and is quick to tell you the history of each one; who keeps up with all the latest Apple news and rumors; and who seems to know the answer to any Mac question, no matter how obscure or technical. Though you may be tempted to ridicule a Mac geek’s obsessiveness, you’ll probably resist that temptation because you want to stay on the geek’s good side—since he or she will be the first person you go to for help when something goes wrong with your own Mac!

I bought my first Mac, a used Mac SE, in 1991—but that doesn’t mean I eased into geekdom over a period of decades. The first thing I did after bringing my SE home was to take it apart and install more RAM. The second thing I did (and this is only a slight exaggeration) was to start customizing the Finder, using ResEdit (if you have to ask, you don’t need to know)—in other words, a bit of modest hacking. Within a couple of months, a large local Mac user group appointed me Disk Librarian. My job was to research, download, and catalog all of the best freeware and shareware products, compile new collections of cool tools every month, and duplicate them on floppy disks to raise money for the club. I threw myself into that job and quickly acquired the reputation of being a know-it-all (in a good way).

My point is that earning a geek badge doesn't require years of Mac use; it’s all in how you approach it. What made me a Mac geek from the start, and not just a guy with a Mac, was that I dove right in and started exploring, tinkering, and learning.

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You can have a lot of fun with Siri, the artificially intelligent, voice recognition-based assistant built into newer iPhones and iPads. But fun though Siri may be, it turns out the little voice inside your iOS device can also help you become increasingly productive. From reminding you to perform a task, to sending meeting invitations, to keeping track of book recommendations—Siri proves to be surprisingly helpful for taking care of everyday things. Here’s an assortment of tasks to get done with Siri.

1. Schedule reminders

Though Apple’s Reminders app isn’t the most full-featured or powerful app around, I still rely on it for simple to-do list management. I almost never type in new reminders on my iPhone or iPad; I use Siri instead.

Time-based tasks and tricky math: The most common thing I use reminders for is time-based tasks: “Remind me to take out the recycling tomorrow at 6:30 p.m.”

That’s the simplest form of time-based reminder you can set with Siri, though, and I often get more complex. For example, Siri can do date math for me. When I signed up for a free trial with a premium Web service, it told me I would be charged if I didn’t cancel within the next 20 days. So I told Siri, “Remind me to decide on the Web service in 19 days at 10 a.m.” Siri knows precisely what to do.

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You click Print, and then wait a moment. Nothing happens. Your attempt has clearly failed. A brief check confirms that the problem is not limited to one document or one app. You can’t print anything. Now what?

The number of causes and fixes for print failures runs wide and deep across the Mac troubleshooting landscape. Here’s a checklist of the more common solutions.

1. Check the Print dialog box

After a failed print attempt, press Command-P again. You’ll likely see a badge icon, such as an exclamation mark, next to the printer’s name in the Print dialog box. You may also see a message appear, explaining the cause of the failure and how to fix it.

Find the right printer: One especially common scenario occurs if you print to more than one printer. You may have not selected the one you intended. If your Mac is a laptop, you may have last printed to your cousin’s printer while visiting her in Topeka, but now you’re back home in Portland. The simple fix is to choose your intended printer from the Print dialog box’s Printer pop-up menu.

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If your Web browser, email program, or any of a hundred other Internet-connected apps on your Mac starts complaining about not having a connection, you may have to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out the cause. After all, a disruption anywhere along the chain between your Mac and a distant server could cause an outage, and it’s not always obvious where to look.

I suggest trying each of the following steps, in order, until you’re able to connect again.

1. Try another site or app

To make sure the problem isn’t restricted to just one website, try visiting another—preferably one that’s highly reliable, such as Google.com.

Similarly, to make sure the problem isn’t just your current app (such as your email program or Web browser), try connecting to the Internet with another app. If only one site seems to be having problems, try visiting Down For Everyone Or Just Me and entering the problematic site’s URL. The service will tell you whether computers elsewhere on the Internet can successfully connect to the site.

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Your hard drive churns. Every click sets off a spinning beachball. Disk Utility doles out the bad news. When your hard drive’s end is near, your best hope is a good backup. Of course it is. But, what if you don’t have a backup? Or what if you thought you had a backup and it failed? At this point, someone will say, knowingly: “You should have had redundant backups.” Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. You shoulda, you didn’t. So, what now?

Keep calm and consider your situation. The fact is, intentionally or not, you probably do have backups of at least some of your data.

Your email messages

Do you use Webmail or IMAP for your email? If so, then you don’t need to worry about your email messages; they’re safely stored on a server. When you repair or replace your failing Mac, all you’ll need to do is enter the information for your email accounts in your email client, or use a Web browser if you use Webmail, and the messages will download.

Data you've synced with iCloud

Have you used Apple’s iCloud to sync your email, calendars, Safari bookmarks, reminders, or notes? If so, don’t despair. On the new or repaired computer, go to Apple Menu > System Preferences and choose iCloud. Sign in to your iCloud account and check the relevant categories (Contacts, Safari, Calendars & Reminders). Your information should appear.

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One of the scariest things that can happen to your Mac, short of actual flames and smoke billowing from the case, is a failure to turn on at all. You press the power button and nothing happens—no startup sound, no light, nothing. If this happens, you can check several things before hauling your Mac to the nearest Apple Store for repair—as often as not, this seemingly difficult problem might have a simple solution.

Electricity, e-lec-tricity

First, make sure that your Mac is getting juice. To do this, you may need to trace the entire flow of electricity to your Mac. Check your Mac’s power cord to ensure it is firmly seated where it connects to the computer as well as where it plugs into the wall. If it goes through an outlet strip or a UPS, make sure that’s also connected and turned on. Also check that any surge protectors are still working—a power surge might have knocked them off.

You can confirm that an outlet is good by plugging in something else, such as a light. (If it doesn’t work, check your fuses or circuit breakers.) If the outlet and all cable connections check out, make sure the power cord has no crimps, breaks, or other damage; a broken wire could be the culprit.

Faulty peripherals and broken buttons

Once you’ve established that your AC power path is good, it’s time to look at your Mac itself. Unplug everything you can—not the power cord, obviously, or your mouse and keyboard if they’re wired, and your monitor if it’s not built in, but disconnect everything else and try pressing the power button again. If your Mac turns on, you know that one of your peripherals was at fault.

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Crashes and freezes in OS X are mercifully rare, but they do occur. Fortunately, most of them can be resolved readily; and even though a crash or freeze may have any of numerous causes or symptoms, the same procedure works for troubleshooting most of them.

Crashing apps

Your first step should be to determine the scope of a problem. Is just one application having difficulties, or is the whole system affected?

Send a report, or not: If an app quits unexpectedly, you know that it's at least part of the problem. App crashes are usually accompanied by an error message. If you see one of these, click Reopen to send Apple a report with details about your system configuration and what went wrong, and then relaunch the app. Or click OK to send the report without relaunching the app.

If you don’t want to send Apple information about crashes automatically, go to the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences, click the lock icon, and enter your username and password to unlock it. Then click Privacy, select Diagnostics & Usage, and uncheck Send diagnostic & usage data to Apple. After you do that, the options in the crash dialog box change to Ignore, Report, and Reopen; only if you click Report is information sent to Apple.

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Most crashes on a Mac affect just one application. But you may encounter a type of system-wide crash that brings down your entire Mac: a kernel panic. When this occurs, there’s no warning and no way to save your work or do anything else without restarting. And, because kernel panics can have many different causes, diagnosing the problem and preventing its recurrence are difficult.

How do you know if it’s a kernel panic?

If you’re running OS X 10.7 Lion or earlier, kernel panics usually result in your screen dimming from top to bottom, and a message appearing in several languages telling you that you must restart your Mac (by holding down the power button for several seconds to turn it off, and then pressing it again to turn it back on).

Starting in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X automatically restarts when you have a kernel panic, and then displays a similar-looking message for 60 seconds (or until you press a key) telling you that your Mac was restarted because of a problem. (If the kernel panic repeats every time your Mac restarts, OS X will give up after five tries and shut your Mac down.)

As Apple notes on its support page about kernel panics, something as random and fleeting as malformed network packets can potentially cause a kernel panic. So, if you experience this problem just once, or only rarely, just restart, get back to work, and forget about it.

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When you’re on the other side of 50, as I am, you become less concerned about how fast your Mac is, and more interested in how well you can see the text it displays. Whether your eyes are aging, your young eyes need glasses, or someone that you provide computer support for could use a boost in seeing the screen, no one should have to squint when surfing the Web, reading email, or writing documents. A few key techniques can increase the font size in applications where easy-to-see text makes the biggest difference.

Bigger fonts and word processing

Most applications that let you compose text also let you adjust the font size. If you’re using a word processor such as Apple’s Pages or Microsoft's Word, or a text editor such as Apple’s built-in TextEdit, you have numerous font and size options. It’s a good idea to increase your font size by a few points if you use corrective lenses; even if the font looks all right, you might not realize that you’re squinting.

In Apple apps such as Pages and TextEdit, pressing Command-T brings up a Fonts panel. Word and other text-heavy programs have a dedicated Font or Format menu. (In Word, choose Format > Font.) There, you can choose the font and size that you find most comfortable to work with.

More readable by default: If you’d rather not fiddle with font size over and over, change your defaults. For example, in Word, adjust your settings in the Font window and then click the Default button at the bottom. In TextEdit, choose TextEdit > Preferences and then tweak the Plain text font and Rich text font settings.

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It happens to every Mac user sooner or later. The virtual gears inside your computer begin to act as though they're running in a vat of tapioca pudding. No matter what you try to do, your Mac moves at a pace that a snail could run circles around. But before carting your Mac off to an Apple Genius Bar, try these fixes.

Restart your Mac

One of the simplest steps you can take is also one of the most effective. Restarting your Mac cures most slow-downs, because it forces background processes to quit, frees up RAM, and generally lets you begin afresh.

Check your Internet connection

For many Mac users, a slow Internet connection is synonymous with a slow computer. That’s because almost everything they do—from surfing the Web to checking email—requires Internet access. If your online activity seems to be moving at a crawl, improving your connection can solve your problem.

Check Network preferences: Do you see a spinning beachball in Safari when you try to load webpages? It may not be clear at first whether pages are taking an unusually long time to load or whether your connection is actually broken. Select Apple menu > System Preferences, and choose Network. Click Assist me and then Diagnostics, choose your connection type, and then click Continue to run the tests. If a problem pops up, follow the Network Diagnostics tool's suggested advice for dealing with it.

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Do you routinely receive correspondence that contains a load of email addresses within the body of the message? Say, you're in charge of pulling together a meeting for the company's worldwide accounting department or you receive behind-the-scenes "Get out now while the getting's good!" missives from recently laid off co-workers. You’d dearly love to compose a message to the people associated with these addresses but it’s a bother to copy and paste them into a new message’s To field. If only there was a way to automate the process.

Of course there is. That way is Apple's Automator—specifically an Automator service that uses an AppleScript to work the service’s magic. It shakes out this way:

Compose your workflow

Launch Automator and, from the workflow template chooser, select Service. (Wondering what a service is? See "How to use services in Mac OS X.") Configure the pop-up menus at the top of the workflow to read Service receives selected email addresses in Mail followed by Input is only email addresses.

Select Utilities from the workflow’s Library column and drag the Rdd AppleScript action to the workflow. Delete the text currently in the Run AppleScript action and paste in this text:

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When you drag files or folders to the Trash icon in the Dock, OS X doesn’t delete them immediately. Just as you can pull something out of a physical trash can before the garbage collector arrives, you can remove files from the Trash until you decide you want to get rid of them for good (and thereby recover the disk space the files were using). When that time comes, you choose Finder > Empty Trash.

Ordinarily, emptying the Trash is immediate and uncomplicated. But occasionally something goes wrong and your Trash won’t empty; the Finder may display an error message indicating a reason (though not how to fix the problem). If that happens to you, here are several solutions you can try.

‘The file is in use’

If the error message claims that a file is in use, quit the last app that accessed that file (if you know what it is). Then, try to empty the Trash again. Sometimes this error is spurious—for example, Mail may report that a file is in use long after you sent it as an attachment. Even though the file isn’t truly in use, Mail might treat it as if it were. Quitting Mail, emptying the Trash, and reopening Mail usually solves the problem.

‘The file is locked’

If the error message tells you that a file is locked, hold down Option and again choose Finder > Empty Trash; the Option key tells OS X to override locked files.

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If you get a lot of email, you know how hard it can be to spot messages from friends and family, or from your most important contacts. The recently introduced VIPs feature, added to Mail 6 in OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6, can alert you when you get emails from your most important friends and colleagues, whether you’re using your computer, iOS device, or even iCloud mail on the Web. Here's how to use it.

Set up VIPs

The VIPs feature works on Macs running Mountain Lion, on iOS devices running iOS 6, and on iCloud on the Web. You can have up to 100 people listed as VIPs.

As long as you’re signed into your iCloud account, your VIPs will propagate across your devices, even to iCloud email on the Web. In addition, if your VIP has a card in Contacts and has more than one email address, the VIP status will be applied to all their addresses. However, there is no way to create or remove VIPs from within Contacts, either on OS X or on iOS.

Adding VIPs on your computer When you get an email from someone in Mail, open the message and hover your cursor over his or her address; a star will appear. Click this star, and the contact will be added to your VIPs list. You can also hover over an email address, click the down-pointing arrow that displays, and choose Add to VIPs.

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Little things mean a lot—especially when tiny tips save time. Ramp up your Web-browsing skills with these speed-friendly techniques for Safari 6.

1. Open a link in a new tab

When you type something into Safari's Address Search Field and click Return to see the top search hit, the new page replaces the current one, as you'd expect. But if you want to keep the current page around, you can: Press Command-Return to open the top hit in a new tab, or press Shift-Return to open it in a new window.

2. Jump to the Address Search Field

Want to enter a URL or search string, but don’t want to take your hands off the keyboard to click? You can move into the combo address/search field by using either of the keyboard commands formerly used for the separate address and search fields: Command-L or Command-Option-F.

3. Bookmark a page instantly

Create a new bookmark on the bookmarks bar by dragging the favicon (the icon in front of the URL) from the address field into the bookmarks bar. The bookmark's default name will be selected, so you can immediately type in a new one if you want to.

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An easy way to keep your Mac healthy is to keep your apps current. Why? Bug fixes, security updates, new features—need I go on? Resolve to stay on top of updates in the new year.

Upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion (if you can)

If you haven’t gotten around to upgrading to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), now’s the time to forge ahead to get new and improved apps and features. Not sure which OS version you’re running? Choose About This Mac in the Apple menu; and in the window that appears, look beneath 'OS X' to see the version number. Mountain Lion is 10.8.x; Lion is 10.7.x. The two previous systems are Snow Leopard (10.6.x) and Leopard (10.5.x).

Can your Mac run Mountain Lion? Check this Apple page for a list of compatible models. You'll find model descriptions there, but how can you tell whether you have, for instance, a “MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)”? In Lion, choose About This Mac in the Apple menu, and click the More Info button. You'll see the model description immediately beneath the model name, near the top of the resulting pop-up box.

In earlier systems, start by getting your serial number from the About This Mac window: Click twice on the version number beneath 'Mac OS X' to cycle to the serial number. Then go to Apple’s Service and Support Coverage Page, enter the serial number, and click Continue. You’ll see your model description.

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