Maria’s Guides

Get a great deal on a USB hard disk from the Apple Store.

I’m in the middle of writing an article about my top ten favorite Leopard features (look for it on October 26 after 6 PM). One of those features is Time Machine, which I really think will simplify my backup procedures and help protect all of my data.

Of course, to back up an entire 500GB hard disk, you need a 500GB hard disk to put all the data on. So imagine my delight when I saw that the Apple Store has a 500GB high speed USB hard disk for just $139.95. Just in time for Time Machine backups.

Check it out here.

Buy the book at a deep discount from McGraw-Hill.

Are you using Quicken 2008 for Windows? The tenth edition of my bestselling guide for Quicken, Quicken 2008: The Official Guide is in stores. But if you’ve been holding off on buying, now’s your chance to buy and save. McGraw-Hill is offering the book for $10 off the $24.99 list price. That’s a steal!

Go to http://www.mhprofessional.com/getpage.php?c=quicken.php&cat=112 for details.

If you’re a Quicken for Mac user, sorry, but we did not do a Mac version of the book. The Mac and Windows versions are very different, so it’s unlikely that the Windows version of my book will help you.

Get brand new books for less than $5 each.

When I moved my office back into my house six months ago, I traded three rooms of space for one. In a way, that’s good. It means I can accumulate less junk. But it also means I have less room to store the author copies of books I’ve written.

Author copies are a number of free copies of an author’s book that the publisher gives to the author for free. The idea is to give the author copies he/she can spread around on speaking gigs and to clients. I don’t do many speaking gigs anymore and I don’t do any consulting, so I don’t have clients. As a result, I’m usually stuck with about half the author copies I get.

I need room in my closet, so I’m giving away a bunch of books. Here’s the catch. To get a book:

• You must have a mailing address in the U.S. (Sorry, but I’m not willing to deal with the post office’s paperwork for overseas shipping.)
• You must cover the cost of shipping, handling, and packaging. I’ve calculated that at various flat fee rates, depending on the size of the book. The most you’d pay is $4.95.

To make things easy, I’ve set up Buy Now buttons that work with PayPal. If you don’t like PayPal, you can contact me with the names of the books you want and I’ll send you a fax number to fax in credit card information. You can also contact me if you want more than one copy of a title; I can probably get you a better deal on shipping than the flat rate per book.

I have a limited number of copies of these books. They will be distributed on a first come, first served basis based on when I get payment. I cannot hold books to wait for payment. As I run out of books, I’ll remove them from this list. So if it isn’t listed, it isn’t available here. When they’re all gone, I’ll remove this post. If I have new titles to give away, I’ll add them to this post.

If you’d like to have the book autographed — after all, why not? — you can use a field in the PayPal form to enter the name of the person you want it autographed to. It makes a unique gift.

There’s just one book left:

Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

ISBN 0-321-30457-8

Computer Platform: Mac OS X Only

Retail Price: $21.99 US

You Pay Shipping Only: $4.95