If you’re one of those people that continually adjust system settings, make changes in terminal, and try new and experimental software then you’ve probably done something in the past to your OS X installation that has compromised performance or made things stop working completely.

On the other hand, you may have installed the latest updates to OS X and various programs just stopped working. If either of these sound like you, you may find it handy to have a back up OS X 10.5 Leopard install that you can boot to and make adjustments to your system.

Installing OS X Leopard on a USB Flash Drive is much easier than expected. In fact it is almost the exact same experience you had when installing the device on your Mac originally. For a complete install you’ll need at least an 8gb Flash drive or a larger external USB Hard Drive.

To install OS X Leopard 10.5 follow these steps:

1. Insert the OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD into your Mac
2. Open system preferences, start up disks, and restart into the OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD
3. Once your computer restarts into OS X Leopard, continue through the introduction and agreement pages that will be displayed until you get to the screen that asks you to select your installation Volume.
4. You can’t yet select your USB Flash drive, so select Utility from the menu bar and open Disk Utility
   

5. In Disk Utility, select the USB Flash Drive and then Select Partition.
6. From here select 1 Partition and then click Options
   

7. Select GUID Partition Table so that our computer can boot from the device
   

8. Name the Volume and click Apply.
9. Close out Disk Utility and return to the Volume selection screen. Select your Volume and continue the OS X 10.5 Installation.
10. If you’re installing on an 8gb Flash Drive you’ll need to be sure to customize the installation and remove any printer drivers, language and fonts, and anything else so you can reduce your install to fit on the device itself.

Now that you’ve installed OS X 10.5 on your Flash Drive, it should boot up to the device anytime you select it from System Preference >> Start up Disks.

From my experience running OS X 10.5 on a USB Flash Drive always runs a bit slow at first but performance increases significantly after 10 minutes or so.

If you would like to install a bare bone OS X installation on a device smaller than 8gb see this guide designed for OS X 10.4 but works essentially the same for 10.5

If you’ve enjoyed this article, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to discover more ways to optimize your Mac experience.

June has started off strong again for Maciverse with a number of first time visitors.  As always We love to hear feedback and appreciate everyone’s comments.

Below are some of the most read articles at Maciverse over the past few weeks:

1. The Case of the Slow Mac and How to Fix it - Noticed reduced performance in your Mac lately?  Check out this article to see what may be your problem.
2. Does your Mac need Virus Protection? - See what Apple’s official stance on the subject is.
3. Virtualbox, Parallels on a Budget - Want to run Windows on your Mac but don’t want to spend the money… Read up on the Free solution.
4. Add Holidays to iCal - A quick tip on how to quickly add Holidays to your iCal calendars.
5. iPhoto Sharing with Picasa Web - Another way to quickly share your iPhoto pictures with people over the web.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you don’t miss any Maciverse.com article.

If you’re an Intel Mac user and run Boot Camp with Windows on your Apple Computer than you may be interested in being able to quickly restart your computer into the other OS on your system.

Of course, you can always use the long way, navigate to System Preferences, click Startup Disk, then select the Windows partition, click restart, and then restart again.

Or you can create a quick automator task that will let you restart into your Windows partition simply by running the script or launching the application you saved in automator.

To create a Quick Switch Startup Disk script or app add the following step to an Automator Workflow: Run Apple Script.

Remove any text in the Run Apple Script action and copy in the follow text:

do shell script “bless -mount /Volumes/yourWindowsVolume/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges
do shell script “shutdown -r now” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges

Replace the text “yourWindowsVolume” with the volume name of your Windows partition and save the workflow as either a script menu plugin or an application.

From here, restarting into Windows is as easy as launching the app or selecting the script from Script Menu in the menu bar.

**Note: you can add the Script Menu to the Menu bar by:

1. Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
2. Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar”

Over the past few months reports have written a number of articles about how Apple is starting to move from just a consumer focused technology company to being a solid IT solution for businesses everywhere. I found that the most interesting part of most of the discussion over Apple and their corporate engagement was that Apple wasn’t seeking out the corporate world.. but the corporate world was seeking them.

This has all changed and is becoming more and more apparent in events that are unfolding during Apple’s WWDC 08.

3G iPhone for the Corporate World

First, it is clear that the enhancements they’ve made to the iPhone is to make the device that much more enticing to the average Business Person. It is a single device that would allow them to carry both their work and personal life with them everywhere they go. It is Work Life Balance in a electronic device. They’ve added Microsoft Exchange Support, Security Features, and opened their SDK to allow anyone (including businesses) to create custom applications to help manage their work efforts.

Apple has spent significant time with the corporate folks over enhancing the iPhone and somewhere along the way they decided that now is the perfect time to push into the Corporate World with their complete IT offering.

Snow Leopard, the Corporate OS X

To position themselves they would need to optimize their OS to the corporate world. Almost all IT departments for any company of decent size is now using Microsoft Exchange to manage email and day to day scheduling through the calendar built into Outlook. While OS X does have its own version of Office, if Apple was to position itself as a corporate competitor it would really need to offer its own way to handle Exchange tasks.

Sure enough, Apple now informs us that “Snow Leopard” the next build of OS X will be one focused on performance, reducing the OS footprint, and offering Microsoft Exchange support as part of the OS. This puts them in perfect position to easily move into IT offerings through companies across the globe.

We theorized a few months ago when Apple announced that they would be including Microsoft Exchange support in the iPhone that the feature would also make its way to Mail. They now explain the service will be available to Mail, Address Book, and iCal.

Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Mac OS X uses the Exchange Web Services protocol to provide access to Exchange Server 2007. Because Exchange is supported on your Mac and iPhone, you’ll be able to use them anywhere with full access to your email, contacts, and calendar.

With the flurry around other announcements including updates to the iPhone, less attention has been devoted to the OS X updates and MobileMe. The new .Mac replacement for the consumer. But, the part of the keynote that stuck out to me was Apple explaining that MobileMe will be the “Exchange Server for the rest of us.”

MobileMe - Microsoft Exchange for the Rest of us

Could Apple be building their own Exchange like technology should the deal with Microsoft go sour at some point? Maybe, or maybe MobileMe will be built with Microsoft Exchange as the driving engine. If they have built their own Exchange like technology what a better way to test it than on consumers. If it works for them, it may just be ready for the corporate world itself.

Lets keep an eye out for the rest of the news coming out of WWDC 08. It may just be additional support for Apple’s Corporate World Position.

If you’re an iWeb user then you’ll be glad to know that Jumsoft has released a number of new themes for iWeb. These 10 new themes cover a wide variety of possible uses and look to have a complete look and feel to them.

Jumsoft is currently selling a pack of 10 themes for $69.99 but individual themes can be purchased for $9.99 each. If the themes work as well as they look then that seems to be a fair price.

Head over to Jumsoft to see if they have the iWeb theme you’ve been looking for.