APC Australia - September 2019

1TB hard disk with only 269GB used.
Should I replace its hard drive with
an SSD?
Andrew Frost

An SSD should make your iMac
quicker, but that may not be worth
the investment required. Before
spending any money on it, work out
why the beach balls are occurring,
and eliminate them: that should
make it more nimble again. The best
tools for discovering the causes of
beach balls are Activity Monitor, and
a log browser like Console for El
Capitan or earlier, or Consolation for
Sierra or later.
Establish which process(es) are
eating up CPU time when the beach
ball appears, then, from the log,
discover what they’re struggling
with. That could be an outdated app,
a conflict, or a process crashing
repeatedly. If Activity Monitor
indicates a shortage of free memory,
increasing that to the maximum of
16GB could give your Mac a new
lease of life.
If you intend upgrading to High
Sierra and beyond, an SSD would be
valuable, as they’re well-supported
by Apple’s new file system, APFS. But
a 1TB SSD would be a substantial
cost, and you might be better putting
that towards a new iMac with its
faster processor and much-improved
graphics processor.
Howard Oakley

You’ll need to perform

some post-ripping

surgery to audiobooks

in iTunes.

MEDIA

RIPPING AUDIOBOOK CDS

I have an extensive audiobook CD

collection that I want to rip using iTunes so

I can stream them to my iPad. I’ve heard

conflicting advice about what to do – can

you provide any guidance?

Marie Laurent

Audiobooks require a bit more work to

file them correctly in iTunes. They’re

stored in your Music folder and

considered music, so need rearranging

manually. Start by optimising iTunes

to rip spoken-word CDs: choose Edit >

Preferences and click ‘Import

Settings...’. Either choose the Spoken

Podcast setting under A AC Encoder or

select MP3, choose Custom and set the

Stereo Bit Rate to 64 kbps to keep file

sizes down. Click ‘OK’ twice, pop in

your CD and click Import CD, verify

the import settings and click OK

again. After the first disc has been

ripped, repeat for all other discs in the

same collection.

Once complete, right-click the

audiobook title in Music view and

choose Album Info, clicking Edit Items

when prompted to edit multiple items.

Switch to Options and change Media

Kind to Audiobook. Import cover art

via Artwork and go to Sorting to

verify the correct author has been

attributed before clicking OK. The

only slight complication is if some (or

all) of the chapters in an audiobook

have been split into separate tracks on

the CD. In this case you’ll need to

select the individual tracks you want

to combine before you rip the disc. To

do that, select the tracks you want to

combine (to make up one chapter, say),

then select Join CD Tracks from the

drop-down menu.

Catherine Ellis

WINDOWS

NO MORE FORCED UPDATES

After being plagued with issues by the

most recent major Windows 10 update,

how can poor Windows 10 Home users like

myself avoid falling into traps laid by the

next feature update?

Alan Fleet

We have excellent news for you, Alan:

Microsoft has finally accepted it

cannot simply push these major

updates on to Windows 10 Home users.

With the 1903 ‘May Update’ and

onwards, instead of it being forced on

you you’ll see a notification under

Settings > Updates & Security >

Windows Update inviting you to

‘Download and install now’, but only

when you’re ready. You’ll only be

forced to update when your current

version reaches ‘end of life’ – around

18 months from its original release.

Better still, once the May Update is in

place Windows 10 Home users will

also gain the ability to pause non-

feature updates up to five times for

seven days (so holding back for up to

35 days) before the update must be

applied.

Rob Mead-Green