Press releases

Mac Fitness Trilogy Helps Users Improve Mac Performance: Three new Take Control ebooks help Mac users speed up their Macs, solve problems, and perform regular maintenance to prevent future trouble.

Press release: June 16, 2011

Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac

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Ithaca, NY—TidBITS Publishing Inc. is pleased to announce that best-selling author Joe Kissell has completed his Mac Fitness book trilogy with the release of Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac (TidBITS Publishing Inc., $15.00 USD), which joins the new second edition of Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac and the recently revised Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac. Alone or together, these books help users get fast, efficient, trouble-free performance from their Macs.

The 196-page Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac is a rich compendium of detailed explanations, specific directions, and handy tips for testing and tuning a Mac. In it, Kissell explains how each component of a Mac contributes to its performance, and shows where bottlenecks can appear that can cause a previously swift machine to bog down with the dreaded spinning pizza of death cursor.

Kissell provides answers to questions like the following:

  • What are the eight quickest fixes for Mac performance problems?
  • Which common claims about Mac performance are myths?
  • How can I objectively measure my Mac's performance?
  • Which popular Mac OS X features have hidden (and severe) speed penalties?
  • What are the best ways to find and eliminate CPU and RAM hogs?
  • Will defragmenting my disk, repairing permissions, or clearing caches speed up my Mac?
  • When is an SSD (solid-state drive) a smart upgrade choice?
  • Which hardware upgrades are worth the money, and which should I avoid?
  • If Web browsing is slow, how can I tell where the bottleneck is?
  • How can I make my Mac start up, go to sleep, or wake up faster?
  • How can I type faster?
  • How can I make my mouse pointer move faster or more fluidly?

Kissell also addresses the needs of those whose Macs have problems beyond sluggish performance. Within the 110 pages of his newly revised second edition of Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac, Kissell provides 17 basic troubleshooting procedures and explains how to solve 15 common problems, and he discusses how to fix less common problems, too.

Completing the trilogy is the 103-page second edition of Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, revised April 2011. In it, Kissell describes a commonsense approach that explains how to start on the right foot with keeping a Mac running smoothly; what should be done daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly; and how to prepare for Mac OS X updates.

For a review copy or more information please email takecontrolpr@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

Additional Resources
For more information about the book, including table of contents, author bios, and cover graphic, see: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781615421350

Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac
Publisher: TidBITS
By Joe Kissell
Ebook ISBN: 9781615421350  
Pages: 196
Ebook Price: $15.00  
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

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About Take Control
The Take Control series is published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. TidBITS co-founders Adam and Tonya Engst have been publishing highly regarded news and editorial since 1990 when they created the online newsletter TidBITS, which covers Macintosh and Internet-related topics. The Take Control series has helped many thousands of readers with high-quality, timely, real-world, cost-effective documentation since 2003.

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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