Today marks the release of my ninth Take Control ebook, Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac. Based on votes received, this was the title more readers than any other were keen to get their hands on, and I’m delighted to have been able to oblige. This ebook covers everything you need to know to keep your Mac performing at its best, as well as reducing the risk of serious problems (and making recovery easier if problems do occur). I think it makes a splendid companion to my earlier, and extremely popular, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, and so do the Take Control publishers: you can purchase the two volumes together for only $15, a 25% discount off the individual prices.
This was an interesting ebook to write, in that many of the tasks I cover provoke heated disagreement, even among Mac experts. How often should you empty your Trash, repair permissions, install software updates, or defragment your hard disk? Is a surge protector or uninterruptable power supply really a necessity? Is it important to get rid of old, unused files even if you have plenty of space on your disk? Should you care about those built-in daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts that Mac OS X may or may not try to run in the middle of the night? As the ebook went through our usual technical review process, we got tons of comments on topics like these from about a dozen different Mac experts, and some of the exchanges were quite lively. Instead of simply saying, “This is the One Right Way,” I decided to include some of the comments expressing other points of view in a series of sidebar conversations, so that readers can judge for themselves what the best approach is for them.
I have plenty more ebooks ahead, but I’m planning to take a break for a couple of months to concentrate on some other projects that have been getting too little attention. And yes, the long-rumored resurrection of Interesting Thing of the Day is among them! I can’t commit to a particular (re-)launch date yet, but new content is definitely on the way, along with a complete site redesign, a new logo, new features, and more yaddas than you can shake a stick at.
