An Apple insider says it will be "most unlikely" to run Windows Vista on Mac. However, two months ago, alexoughton has been successful in coming up with a dual boot of OS X and Vista, but with a few problems. Now treblah, from MacRumors' forums, was successful in getting Vista up and running on her MacBook Pro. After a few false starts, she finally got the impossible to happen.

She shares to us the instructions on how to replicate her feat, and the steps will follow from the assumption that you have a working copy of XP installed in Mac with the use BootCamp.

To see if treblah's guide will help you in running Vista on your own Macbook Pro, just follow the eleven steps she's provided. She leaves us with this random note:

"From inside of OS X you will no longer be able to select Windows inside the 'Startup Disk' pane. I always have to hold option while booting in order to select which OS I want to boot. Windows Flip3D is horrible compared to Exposé and the 'live thumbnails' in the start bar are only updated if the program is not minimized."

Good luck and let us know if the steps will work for you.

Many people are contented with OS X running on their Macs, but Hans Verbeeck isn't just going to sit around knowing that Microsoft Vista Beta 2 can run on his MacBook Pro. So, just like the other folks who wanted to see for themselves how the new Vista would perform in a Mac, Verbeeck got the system up and running. His verdict? "It is just beautiful". With some reinforcements from Jeff Dorsey, a system engineer in Redmond, Verbeeck captures his successful attempt in pictures.

A bit of a boo-boo. Verbeeck downloaded the 64-bit version.

 

The Windows Vista screen. 'Install Now?' Yes please.

The partitioning scheme should look like this.

If you get this message, don't panic. All you have to is reboot from the Vista Install DVD and then select repair.

There you have it, Vista running on MacBook Pro. This dialog box appeared when Verbeeck plugged in an external screen.

To get Verbeeck's step by step installation procedure, click on the "Read" link.

Quite a lot of internet users have Internet Explorer as their default web-browser. Developer Gnosis has just made it possible (for himself) to run IE6 on the Mac OS X using WINE ("Wine Is Not an Emulator" or "WINdows Emulator" to some).

The developer used the installer script for IEs4Linux to install IE6. Although the font rendering won't work because of the IEs4Linux installer's irregularities, the browser still works fine.

According to Gnosis and some of those who tried running IE6 on OS X, sometimes it will lock up wile in the middle of a launch or when launching a page. Unfortunately, it won't recover.

Aside from Wine, he installed cabextract, a software for extracting Microsoft cabinet files, using DarwinPorts. Step-by-step instructions on how to run IE6 on OS X follow:

1. Download http://homepage.mac.com/spullara/wine-0.9.7-mac-i386.tar.bz2
2. Extract its contents into /Library
3. Add /Library/Wine/bin to your path ("export PATH=$PATH:/Library/Wine/bin" in the shell)
4. Run 'wine' in the shell to ensure that it's working. It's okay if it gives you errors, as long as it runs.
5. Go to http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/news/ and download beta5 (beta6 didn't work for me).
6. Extract the contents anywhere (e.g. to your Desktop) and then use the shell to cd into it (e.g., "cd /Users/bupkis/Desktop/ies4linux")
7. Try running ./ies4linux. It will probably give you an error about needing certain dependencies (cabextract, wget, etc). Use DarwinPorts to get anything you need (e.g., "sudo port install cabextract").
8. Once it runs without dependency issues, follow the instructions. For the locale step, I had to manually enter "EN-US" -- pressing ENTER to use the default didn't work. Also, I only installed IE6; I didn't try installing the IE 5.x versions.
9. Run X11.app
10. In xterm, run 'bin/ie6' (i.e., /Users/you/bin/ie6). You may need to add /Library/Wine/bin to your path for xterm.
11. After a stream of crazy output, hopefully you'll see IE6 pop open correctly.

A contextual menu plug-in for Mac OS X has been created that adds your most common tasks to the right-click menu. OnMyCommand is now on v1.7.1 and is a UNIX and AppleScript executor. It lets you build your own Contextual Menu Item or GUI application.

To get started on this application, just download OnMyCommand v1.7.1 (link provided below). In the Disk Image that will mount, click on "Install OnMyCommandCM" to install the OnMyCommand Plugin. Afetr that copy OMCEdit_E folder then launch OMCEdit_E folder in the said folder. Click the "Downloads Commands" and you'll see the nearly 450 OnMyCommand commands that users have developed. Just double-click on the commands you want and they will be loaded into your OMCEdit_E window.

Once the commands are loaded, you can now edit them to fit your own needs. If you want to learn how to make your own OnMyCommand commands but is UNIX illiterate and is therefore afraid it will be too difficult to create your own OnMyCommand tasks, you might want to try the tutorial provided by Tom Abracode.

Download: [OnMyCommand]

You have all read about Gert Stahl's discovery of a piece of laminate covering the vent under his MacBook's screen. Just out of curiosity, he removed the covering and has since had a MacBook that is "running a lot cooler". That was 11 days ago. Apple may have discovered this covering only recently.

Last May 31, an article was posted in the Apple site about how the MacBook runs warm because of "a thin piece of clear plastic covering the rear vent". True to the speculations posted here in QJ, Apple admits that the cover was put there "to prevent dust from getting into your computer". However, it seems like the plastic covering wasn't meant to stay there. As Apple advised, "If your MacBook has the plastic still over the vent, simply remove and discard it."

So go ahead and check that MacBook. If it does have the thin clear plastic covering, removing it will hopefully give you the same results as Gert Stahl's.

Some treat their iPods with utmost care as if the Apple product is such a precious little baby (okay, me included). Yet sometimes a scratch here and there is unavoidable. If you own a 5G/Video iPod, then here's something that will make your precious one looking new (well, almost).

Taking lead from another person's advice, one blogger has provided steps on how to remove scratches from you 5G/Video iPod with the use of Brasso Plus. Before you go further and follow his instructions, he leaves a warning: "donÂ?t blame me if you mess up your precious iPod." SO proceed with caution. Here are the steps to achieving a new-looking iPod:

1. Clean off the iPod with screen wipes.
2. Apply a small amount of Brasso to the microfiber cloth.
3. Work the Brasso into the iPod using swirling, diagonal, horizontal, and vertical strokes. Let it dry then apply more.
4. After letting the Brasso dry twice, buff it off in the same manner it was applied.
   

There you have it, a scratch-free iPod. Just make sure to take your sweet time when following the steps. If not you might encounter the same problem the blogger encountered in his first try - the Brasso, instead of removing scratches, created new ones.

Your iPod may be one of the most important contraptions of your life- it keeps you company, peps up your day, or just gives you something to do when you're really bored. Now, if you could only fix that iPod cord of yours so that it won't get caught up with your jacket's zipper. Well, we may have a solution for you, with these 5 easy steps you can organize your iPod cord in no time, unless you don't know how to tie a know or something of that sort.

Step 1- Make a regular knot close to the plug's end, but don't pull the earbuds all the way through.

The full instructions await after the jump!

Got a 4th-gen iPod that's stopped working for whatever reason? You could drop it if you like to get it to start working again, as some (desperate) people have done with their units. But I have to tell you that that method doesn't always work. The few lucky ones who get their iPods to work again end up using it for only an hour or so before they die again.

Take this Mac geek, er, Mac genius for example. JC, as he fondly calls himself, had the same problem with his iPod. Since it wasn't working anymore, he tested his iFrogz case too by dropping the entire thing from his balcony three floors up.

Yup, three floors up. And it started working again but only for an hour.

The moral of the story? There isn't one yet. But here's a more constructive way of fixing your dead iPod. He disassembled his iPod and looked for whatever was wrong with it - the use of substandard cables, mis-jumpered cables, dust stuck on the heads on a hard drive.

What did the trick was the re-seating of both ends of the hard drive cables. As the connectors are taped down and sandwiched between the hard drive and the main board, one can't see them loosening easily. Re-seating it made it work again. Hopefully, other dead iPods will work again when disassembled and re-seated this way.

Okay, this is kind of cool. Although you could easily dial the numbers quicker and easier, this method is just kind of cool. Brian at MacMerc.com posted a tutorial on using your iPod to speed dial. I'm not sure exactly how this works, or why it works, but this is what he had to say about it:

"Analog phone networks dial using tones. By playing your speed dial file you are simply bypassing the phone's internal tone generator and speaking directly to the switchboard."

Using this tutorial, you'll be able to use your iPod, a pair of speakers, a phone, and iTunes to program speed dial functions into your MP3 player. Just select the number you want to dial, place the speakers near the phone, and hit play. But for now, hit the read link below to get the full scoop.

Batteries have a way of dying on you when you need them most. Just watch a horror movie. You know the scene: monster pursues victim, hapless victim runs to car, car won't start because battery is dead, monster makes foie gras out of victim's liver.

In real life, dead batteries can be equally annoying. After all, how many things can you do with an iPod with a sucked-out power cell? Good news! We found Ivan who found three ways to make iPods run almost a full hour longer without changing batteries. Or without holding your iPod while sticking your fingers in a power socket. Here are Ivan's tricks on iPod energy conservation:

One: Compress your videos
The smaller the video (size, bitrate, framerate), the longer the battery life. A 30GB iPod battery can extend its life by almost half an hour by playing compressed video. The 60GB model could give up to 40 minutes more.

The rest of the post awaits after the jump!