The Terminal is both powerful and daunting. For Mac users that cut their teeth on OS9, staring at a blank blinking cursor might cause you to break into a sweat. For Windows users, who cut their teeth on DOS, it’s a little less overwhelming.

Learning to use the Terminal will boost your productivity, you can perform some actions only with the Terminal. In this post from Tech Radar, author Craig Grannell shows you how to get more out of OSX by learning a bit of Terminal-fu.

My favorite tips include:

• Using the killall command to kill a process.
• Using the defaults command to declutter my Open With menu

Do you have any favorite Terminal commands, share them in the comments.

You switched to a Mac because you like having a stable, fast, reliable system. However, it may sometimes be necessary to run Windows XP. If you need to run old applications or the occasional game, having a Windows box might come in handy.

Fortunately, Apple and some 3rd parties have devised solutions which allow you to do just that.

This videos shows you how you can run Windows XP using Bootcamp, VMWare Fusion or Parallels. All three are decent solutions. Bootcamp has the advantage of completely taking over the system. For games or other performance intensive applications, this is a good solution.

Parallels and VMWare Fusion provide what is called hardware virtualization. This software allows you to run Windows and Windows applications side by side with your Mac OSX system. While this might sound like a better solution, it comes at a small performance hit for both systems. This performance hit only happens when you are running the virtual machine.

Whichever solution you choose it’s great to know that you don’t have to abandon the investment you might of made in Windows software.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXMi4vElc0

photo credit: zoovrooWhen a new user is created in OSX, the Dock is prepopulated with a set of icons. Dragging the icons off the dock removes them. You are free to customize the Dock by placing your frequently used icons there.

There may be an occasion where you need to restore the Dock to it’s default set of application icons. This is pretty easy with a bit of Terminal-fu.

Open the Terminal application by Navigating through Go->Utilities->Terminal

When the terminal window opens type

cd ~/Library/Preferences
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

This will delete the configuration file for the dock. Log out and back in and the Dock should look the way it did when you first created your user account.
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If you have any other interesting Mac tricks, let us know.