Category: Tech

Airport Express not connecting consistently

We have been having trouble with our Airport Express. It is working very slow (takes about 1 min. or longer to load a page). The internet works fine when we plug it directly into the computer. It was working fine a month ago but now it won’t. I have tried resetting it and unplugging everything. We have had problems with this Express before (we had to unplug it fairly often just to get our computers to connect to it).

Unfortunately, I find Airport devices to be the most finicky of Apple products, often requiring more resets than a simple device like this should. That said, I also have never had an Airport unit actually be a lemon, except one that was really old.

So, I would absolutely recommend resetting the Airport Express back to factory defaults (pressing the reset button for about 15 seconds until the light blinks 4 times), and reconfiguring it with Airport Setup Assistant. If you have already done that, you might try switching cables out.

If THAT doesn’t work, and if it’s under warranty, please call Apple to get a new one. If it’s out of warranty, might as well buy a brand new, freaky-fast Airport Extreme!

Address Book contacts are gone

I recently realized that all my contacts in my address book are gone. I was wondering how I should go about getting them back. I figure I need to use the back-up hard drive for this, but don’t know what to do exactly.

Exactly. As long as you haven’t backed up to the external since the contacts went away, you’re good. So:

  1. Quit Address Book
  2. In your home folder on your laptop, go to ~/Library/Application Support (where “~” is your home folder).
  3. Inside there, change the name of the folder AddressBook to “AddressBook old” (no quotes)
  4. Now plug in the external drive, and from your backup’s Application Support folder, drag that AddressBook folder into your laptop ~/Library/Application Support.
  5. Eject the external (just in case)
  6. Open Address Book. Your contacts should be there.

BTW, if that drive is the LaCie I remember it to be, with USB in addition to Firewire, then with the new Airport Base Station, we can plug the drive into the Base Station and share it to your network. Instant Network Attached Storage. Sweet!