A failed startup no longer has to mean hours of troubleshooting.

Reader Larry wrote me regarding his new Asus machine, which came without any kind of recovery disks (which would be used to restore Windows in the event of a major system meltdown). That’s not ...

Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all ...

An optical disc (CD, DVD) or USB drive that contains a bootable program that takes control of the computer. Computers are typically configured to look for the OS on a CD or DVD first and then the hard ...

Bootable disc image files may contain all the data necessary to create a disc from which computers can boot, but if you want them to work, you can't just burn them to a disc the way you would regular ...

The USB flash drive has replaced the floppy disk drive as the best storage medium for transferring files, but it also has its uses as a replacement for CDs and DVDs. USB drives tend to be higher in ...

Some malware cannot be removed from your computer easily once it gets past your anti-virus protection and integrates itself deeply into your system—sometimes making it unbootable. In such a situation, ...

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It’s also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent ...

Happy Mountain Lion Day! Now that you have downloaded the 4.34GB installer, you may want to install Mountain Lion on more than one of your personal machines. Do you really need to wait 45 minutes or ...

This article is for people whose Macs came preinstalled with Mavericks. If you can download the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store, you should instead use our standard instructions for ...