Helpful Hint From a DIY Mac Tech

OK, sort of.

First off, let me just say - I love my Mac. I really, really do. Most of the time it is the easiest thing in the world to work on and change things to work better and fix. And, almost always, I find the way to make it work. It's like owning a puzzle that you always figure out and this gives me a feeling of accomplishment. Or, I if all else failed, I would ask Scott.

Since Scott is no longer in the other room, I have to call and see if he can help. Or lean on someone else.

As most of you know, I don't like asking for favors. I really do try to do it myself. And, this one, folks, has taken me a year.

So, I had backed up my computer once I got my external hard drive by copying all the files from one location to my external hard drive. Once I did this, I noticed I had 2 copies of Windows Media Player on my computer, so I trashed one.

I went to empty my trash and darn it if the Windows Media Player was saying that it was locked. So, I went through all the folders and still, there were some hidden files that were locked.

Well, no worries, I'll just take it out of my trash and put it on my Desktop, empty my trash and put it back in.

Oh no.

It copied it to my Desktop and left a copy in the trash. Windows Media Player had become a bunny and started to reproduce as one would. By the end of my little experiment, I had 4 copies of WMP in my trash.

So, to empty my trash, I had to continually click the "OK" when prompted that I could not delete a file because it was locked. And, there were A LOT of these files - I found out later, about 80 per folder. I did however, end up practicing my drumming technique. On my interior mouse. On my laptop. This just simply would not do.

I went to a lot of reference sites and tried to figure this out. All of them said to do all this weird stuff, reboot in another mode, wipe the hard drive, chant the Dummy for Mac handbook over the computer. The responses were negative to people who had tried these suggestions. And some people found that they destroyed their lap top, lost all of their information and the damn thing still was in the trash.

I was not alone in my plight. It was not comforting however.

Eventually, I gave up and decided I would take it in to an Apple store or TechServ at some point.

Then, recently, I got fed up and decided to try again. The key was in unlocking all the files, which I thought I had done. So, I unlocked all the files again that were in the trash. Then, tried to unlock the program itself. It would not let me unlock it.

Light bulb.

My solution when the lockable is unlockable - rename the file and extension.

Which I did. I just put something like "asjidkfp" with no "." or extension after - the common pop up - are you sure - I clicked yes - and what it changed it into was beautiful. It changed the program into a folder. And, low and behold, in that folder was all the language files...that were...locked.

I began the task of plowing through all the folders then all the programs within those folders, unlocking everything. Click, Click, Apple A, Apple I, unlock, moving on. There were about 6 languages per program with 75 files that needed to be unlocked per. I worked for about 1/2 an hour and was finished. Was this actually going to work?

I slid my finger on the keypad to move my mouse up to empty the trash. Viola. The crinkle of paper after you have thrown out the trash on a MAC happened. I hadn't heard that sound in a year.

Ah. Success.