Ask TUAW: Removing printer drivers, renaming partitions, running your Mac with the lid closed and more

I'm running Leopard 10.5.6 on the latest MacBook 2.4GHz.

The problem I'm having is that the keyboard shortcut for scrolling through Spaces seems to have been changed from the default "Control+arrow" to "Option+arrow". This kinds of screws up with how I move from word to word on my text documents.

The question is: How do I change the shortcut back to the default shortcut?

I have a question that may have been answered before, but I can't seem to find it:

I just bought a new iMac 20" and I want to know if I can use either Parallels or Boot Camp to make a partition (or Virtual Machine) on an external hard drive and then clone my old PC "C" drive into it to use it as it was?

I have been searching for hours now and found basically the same question asked by ZR on 7-18-2007, but I can't find that answer in Ask TUAW so far. Here's a link to that page:

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/18/ask-tuaw-raw-support-randomized-playlists-recovering-songs-fr/#commentform

Any help will be greatly appreciated! Either a new answer or if someone can point me to the answer to the previously posed question.

Thanks in advance, and let me just say WOW! What a great site for us new Mac owners!

I have a question:

I have two batteries for my MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2006 model and the battery is kind of shaped a little inconveniently so that I am afraid that when I carry it in my school bag the sharp edges and corners of the top metal plate might cause damage to my books, or vice versa so that the corners get damaged from stuff that is in my bag, effectively causing the battery not to fit into my laptop anymore...

Is there a reasonably sized case designed to carry a extra MBP battery around?

One for next time:
I now have MobileMe. I'd like to back up my photo library to iDisk - it's the most important thing on my computer - but the package is grey and obviously too big to upload, even though it would fit in the storage space I have. How do I get around this, and how can I then upload added photos or sync my photo library?
Thanks in advance,
Andrew, MacBook, 10.5.6

I'm prepping an iMac for sale and will do a clean install off an original Leopard disk (10.5.0). If I want to be nice and update the iMac for its future user, then is there a way to update to 10.5.6 without losing the initial welcome/setup screen?

I have the leopard w/ all updates on a brand new imac and i wanted to know if I could run the windows 7 beta DOWNLOAD on my mac via bootcamp & partitions. I ask this because online everyone talks about their windows 7 beta disks, but microsoft offers it as a download, too, and I wanted to know how it would work.

Question:
Right-click context menu in Mail> Search in Google. This opens Safari.
Firefox is set as my default browser. Any fix?

I had a question that I can't seem to find a simply answer to. I NEVER use Exposé, Spaces, etc and would love to use the function keys for things like Play/Pause iTunes, next track etc. I have an older MacBook without the keys built-in (Mid-2007). For example I would like to assign F8 to Play/Pause, F9 to Previous Track and F10 Next Track. I understand you can go to the the keyboard pref-pane and assign these keys to iTunes specifically. However, this does not work when you using another application (for example when I am writing in Word or browsing the net). Basically I would like to add the functionality play/pause etc Universally. I found an article about messing around with the key-bindings xml file - way beyond me and frankly I dont want to start messing around with the core files.

At the moment I use GimmeSomeTune for this (Command-F8 for Play/Pause etc), but it will not allow me to assign only F8 - I would ideally like to have the functionality without a third-party app.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Be wary! I used to have the lid close all the time on my MBP, with an external display attached, until I had problems with the LCD screen because of the heat (centered on the lower left part of the laptop, where the hard disk is located, so upper left part of the screen).

Luckily I was still on warranty, and now purchased Applecare!

One thing to remember about running in clamshell mode: You will age your screen faster than running it open. Even considering that the MacBooks don't use the keyboard as an active vent, as do many PC notebooks, there is still quite some heat coming from that area and you can feel that if you run with the screen closed for a while.

The CCFL backlights in older MacBooks will suffer from this most. Over time, they tend to 'yellow' and heat accelerates this, sometimes even causing one part of the screen which is more yellow than another. The LED backlit MacBooks will suffer much less from this, however (they may even be immune: I haven't worked with LED screens long enough to be sure).

You can tell if you have an LED backlight in your MacBook: The Energy Saver preference icon will be a new-style flourescent bulb whereas a MacBook with a CCFL backlight will have an incandescent bulb as the icon.