How to Burn Your Own OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion Install DVD or USB Flash Drive

1) Download Lion from the Mac App Store. The installer usually shows up in your Applications folder. Make a duplicate of the installer in your Applications in case anything goes wrong.

2) Right-click on the installer and hit "Show Package Contents". Navigate to Contents > SharedSupport and look for a file called "InstallESD.dmg".

3) Open up Disk Utility and drag the DMG file into the left-hand sidebar. If you're burning it to a DVD, insert your DVD, select the disk image in the sidebar, and hit the "Burn" button. Skip down to the last step to use it.

4) If you want to burn Lion to a USB flash drive, plug it in and click on it in the left-hand sidebar in Disk Utility. Go to the Partition tab and select "1 Partition" from the dropdown menu. Choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) on the left.

5) Hit the Options button under the partition table and choose "GUID Partition Table". You'll need this to make the drive bootable on a Mac. Hit the Apply button when you're done to format your drive (note: it will erase everything on the drive).

6) Click on the "Restore" tab, choose the InstallESD.dmg file as the source and your flash drive as the destination. Hit the Apply button and it will create your bootable USB drive.

7) Reboot into OS X and hold the option key when you hear the startup chime. You can boot into your DVD or flash drive from there.

Note: You'll not only be able to install Lion from this drive, but you'll also be able to use Disk Utiltiy, recover from a Time Machine backup, and do everything else you could do with the old installation DVDs. Note that when you install Lion, it'll create a recovery partition with all these features anyway, so you don't need the DVD unless you're doing a clean install. Though it's always nice to have around in case something happens, like you erase your entire drive.

How to Disable Window Restoration in Lion?

1) Launch System Preferences and click on the “General” icon


2) At the bottom of the “Number of recent items” list, uncheck the checkbox next to “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps”.

Note: This is a sweeping change that impacts all applications and the Finder itself, meaning all apps will no longer save their previous state, including when you reboot your Mac.

Ungrouping a Conversation in Apple Mail

1) Launch Apple Mail.


2) Go to "View" on the top and uncheck the "Organize by Conversation" option.

Note: Apple Mail cannot determine which messages go in which conversations.  This seems like a software bug.

Can anyone write to us and tell us why Apple Mail groups messages that are not in the same conversation?