Services, Remote Support and Contracts
TIDBITS, MUSINGS & HELPFUL HINTS
Back Up, Back Up, Back Up! You need extra copies of your data because the hard drive inside your Mac will eventually wear out. It is a fact of life. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've been approached by distraught individuals who knew better, but just never got around to making those critical backups. Human nature is such that perhaps over 95% of people are not going to manually do consistent periodic copying of data. Let's face it, it's time consuming, tedious, and easy to put off. The trouble starts when your hard drive stops working. You may get a warning with a tell tale click click click or you may not. Here's what you can do: hire me to set you up with an external hard drive on which I will clone the entire contents of your internal drive and setup a daily automatic backup. It'll cost you about $150 for a great quality drive you can rely on and about an hour and a half of my time. And best of all you'll be able to start up from this drive in an emergency, and clone back onto a replacement drive when necessary.
If you are still running old Apple computers that have OS 9 or earlier operating systems on them and these machines have no Firewire ports on them, you need to be aware that copying your old data off them takes a really really long time. Sometimes the operating system even has to be upgraded before an attempt can be made to save your data. If you are going to be a good frugal Yankee and be worrying about pennies, thats fine, you may want to get yourself a USB Flash Drive and spend those hours on your own time. If you can afford to spend the money and aren't going to freak out about the time that's cool, I'm happy to do it for you, but please figure this out ahead of time.
Penny wise and pound foolish. Ben Franklin was one smart dude, common sense to spare. As it applies to trying to keep old Apple Computers going it can sometimes be very hard for people to think about buying new equipment and letting go of what seems to be a perfectly fine functional computer. The problem is, development of OS 9 was discontinued in 2002. Apple does not support it anymore, period. There are several trip points now, one of which is that Internet Explorer in OS 9 doesn't work correctly in many cases. It doesn't have up to date security or Java script and that's a problem with many Web sites. Same thing is true of AOL in OS 9. The last Netscape version and iCab can give some functionality but I do not find them to be satisfactory. Wireless is another issue. Currently we are working with the Airport Extreme hardware, with a faster wireless standard (N) that uses different encryption standards and sometimes the old software and equipment won't talk to the new in a reliable way. So folks, do yourself a favor, give the old machine to a nephew, niece, son or daughter for use as a word processor and buy yourself a new computer, everything will be so much easier and faster you'll be glad you made the decision and you won't be sending good money after bad.
Do yourself a HUGE favor and avoid like the plague the purchase of HP All-in-One printers. Their printer Software is a resource hog and runs in the background all the time, not a smart strategy in my experience. If you need color I like Epson, Canon, and Kodak. For pure black and white needs get a laser printer. What you choose depends on your volume needs of course. If light, you will do well with a Lexmark E120N off Amazon.com, currently for about $123. It even has an Ethernet port.
Please write down your Administrative Password. You are prompted to create one during the initial set up. This is required for any future software installations or configuration changes. Forgetting the password will typically happen in cases where the machine was setup without really understanding all the ramifications of the setup process. If you hire me to set your new machine properly, I'll walk you through it all and document everything. Also keep track of your Apple System Discs, they are needed to reinstall software, reset your password and perform hardware diagnostics. Further, Administrator accounts should not have a blank password, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506. Administrator user accounts that have a blank password (that is, no characters at all for the password) will be unable to use sudo functions in Terminal.
I can sell you ram upgrades for your Mac. I have a long time vendor who provides a lifetime warranty yet has great prices. Apple waaay over charges for the ram on the Apple Store. There's no good reason to spend that extra money. However, before sending a machine in for warranty service with Apple, do temporarily replace the new Ram with the original so that they don't blame the problems on the Ram based on warranty rules.
I suggest you not set up your machine to automatically login. Instead create at least a secondary administrative user as a clean emergency user that you can enter in the event your primary user space should ever get corrupted. Done this way, at each start up you'll be presented with a login window at which you'll enter your password each time before it will proceed to the desktop. It has the added benefit of keeping your machine more secure from potentially prying eyes. I find it is also better not to have programs automatically launch at startup, if your machine develops a system problem and won't start up fully, having programs trying to launch at the same time can make repair more difficult.
I still like to repair disk permissions both before and after any software installations. This is done with Disk Utility which lives in the Utilities folder, which in turn is located inside the Applications folder. It can also be done from your first System DVD Installer that came with your machine if necessary.
Learn how to properly install software in OS X, what is a disk image, what do I drag where? Typically one downloads an installer with a .dmg at the end of the name. This file is doubleclicked, creating a Disk Image, this in turn needs to be opened. Inside you will either find the actual Application which you can drag to the Applications folder OR another installer icon you have to doubleclick and follow the prompts. You will typically be asked to enter your Administrative Password at some point.
You can drag an Application from inside the Applications folder onto the dock to create an alias or shortcut on the dock, but be careful not to drag the Application out of the Applications folder, some Applications will not function properly out of their home folder and when updaters are run and the Application cannot be found, trouble will likely ensue.
Cool iPod (Hard disk based units) repair trick: Occasionally your ipod can become unresponsive and seem to be broken. If all else fails to get your iPod to mount on the desktop, try this, plug it into your mac, launch disk utility, if it can see the ipod go ahead and erase the ipod by reformatting the iPod (this does assume you have backed up your songs already, if you have not, and you have high value content, you may want to talk to a commercial recovery facility, hopefully you already thought ahead). Now you can launch iPod updater and click restore, you may just get a real nice surprise! (Note this works on an older 80 gig iPod Classic and may not work on newer iPods. Ipod updating is now done automatically from within iTunes).
Can you navigate between Icon view, List View and column view? I can show you how to take advantage of each mode. But do yourself this favor first, Apple in their infinite wisdom ships the operating system with what I think is a goofy default setting, so when in "Finder" (you do know what I mean here right?), go under the menu item called Finder and select preferences, in the window that opens, check off the box next to "Always open folders in a new window". Now you can compare multiple folder windows side by side and move files back and forth much more easily!
Ok, navigate to Applications folder. Personally, I like list view since items appear alphabetically and they are easier to find, then go down to Utilities folder, flip that open, and now take Printer Setup Utility and drag that onto your dock, it will come in handy later (Note, in Leopard (10.5.x) print/fax control is relegated to System Preferences). You may also find some use for Grab if you want to have more control over making screen shots. Disk utility is another handy utility to have on your dock, as you will use this to repair disk permissions.
In iTunes, if you are going to want to burn Mp3 CD's to use in your car, you will need to convert any ACC Audio file types into Mp3 file types. While in iTunes look for view options (this will be in different places depending on your version of itunes) and check off the box next to kind. I also like to have size and bit rate checked off as well as date added, and time. You may find unchecking the some of the less useful default items makes for a less cluttered itunes window. You can now drag headers to appear in whatever order you want. If you click on a header the entire list will sort by that header. Make sure you are in the main library when you make all these changes as they are specific to the playlist you are in, which frankly I find very annoying. Ok, now that you've sorted your Kind list you should be able to see all your ACC files. Next in iTunes you'll need to find (location varies depending on version) and change the "import using" drop down menu to Mp3. Now, If you highlight one of these ACC songs, and go up to Advanced tab, you can see that you will be able to select "Convert selection to Mp3" or "Create Mp3 Version", choose that and a minute later your will have created a copy of that song that is now a Mp3 version, you may wish to toss the ACC version so you don't have duplicates. You can convert en mass by shift clicking on multiple songs at once. Now you can create a play list from the Mp3's that will burn as a MP3 CD no problem.
