I was helping setup a new MacBook for a friend of mine today. During the setup process OS X asked her to create an account and to assign a password to it. Everything went well and we were able to setup the Mac in no time at all.

However, when we were updating the OS and the computer asked for a password, it would not work. It kept saying that the password was wrong. Uh-Oh….

Good thing that there’s a reset utility found in the installation disc that ships with your Mac. For the times that you forgot your account password, you can use this utility to reset the account password. It’s fairly simple.

1. Boot up with your install disc by restarting your Mac and holding the “C” key on your keyboard until the Mac boots up using the install disc.

2. There’s a Utilities menu found that will appear during the install prompt. Select that and choose Reset Password. Select the startup hard disc volume of your Mac. Choose your original account and enter a new password. Hit save and it’s good to go. *Important! Don’t choose System Administrator (root).

For the original Apple support article, click here. Make sure to also check out this article that will help you solve Keychain issues that will come up as a result of the password reset.

Most new switchers to Mac that I know ask me this question, “How do I defrag on a Mac?”.

Defrag on a Mac is known as optimization. Files on your hard drive can become fragmented over time. Due to the way OS X is built, there’s little need to optimize your HD. As such it hasn’t been really a practice for Mac users to do this. However if you’re really OC about these things, you can use apps such as Onyx to help you with your maintenance.

Here’s a good read from Apple’s support site regarding optimization.

I guess the best way to describe Woopra is that this is your site stats app in porno. The real time tracking system and the GUI is kick ass - but not a lot of Macintosh users can make it work because it requires the Java Virtual Machine 1.6 to run.

How to activate Java 6 on OS X

1. Do a system update and download the latest Java installation.
2. Go to Applications –> Utilities –> Java –> Java Preferences
3. Click to activate Java Version 6 (refer to image highlights above)
4. Drag Java SE 6 64 Bit to the top of the priority list (refer to image highlights above)
5. You’re done! Now you can install the application onto your Macintosh

If you’re running on an old G4 Mac, you won’t be able to run this. Time for an upgrade?