The Lance J. Technoweb

After a few years of fooling around, I decided to make up my own ultimate Mac Boot USB stick. My goals:  When I administrate computers, I want to have most everything I need on a single boot device so I don't have to fool around downloading, installing, or searching. My boot stick includes the software that I need most frequently.  It isn't that complicated, but it took a while to actually figure it all out.  Best of all, you can easily make your own! Required Stuff: A 32 GB (or larger) USB 3.0 "thumb drive".  These devices are inexpensive, portable, fast, and readily available.  I use something like this PNY USB 3.0 stick. What not to use: Small thumb drives.  You may be able to get away with a 16 GB device, but anything less than 16 GB will limit your flexibility.  Hard disks or SSDs.  They're more expensive, bulky, and HD's are less reliable SD Cards.  An SD card is an option, but the truth is that a standard USB 3.0 thumb ...

I'm the type that tries to get the most bang out of a computer - where many consider a 3 year old computer "end of life", I can easily double that lifespan. A lot of people ask me what I've done for upgrades to the Macs I manage.  Here are some examples of what I did. 2009 MacBook (6 years old) 1 TB Hybrid Drive (originally a traditional 120 GB drive) Seagate 1TB Laptop SSHD 4 GB memory (originally at 2 GB) G.SKILL DDR2 RAM 2009 MacBook Pro (6 years old) 250 GB SSD (originally a traditional 250 GB drive)  Kingston 240GB SSD 4 GB of memory not upgraded.  I find 4 GB to be plenty powerful. 2010 MacBook (5 years old) 250 GB SSD (originally a traditional 250 GB drive) Kingston 240GB SSD 8 GB memory (originally at 2 GB) G.Skill DDR3 RAM  Although 4 GB is powerful enough, I was upgrading it from 2 GB.  So using the principle of upgrading as few times as possible, I moved it to 8 GB. 2011 iMac (4 years old) 8 GB memory (original...