Tag: mac

When Your Mac Is Really Screwed Up

Facebook msg, Subj: : ( 
Suddenly there’s a 2″ thick (nearly opaque) white bar running down the center of my iMac screen. It’s distressing me. And of course my AppleCare Protection Plan recently expired. : (  What do you charge for a diagnostic look-see?  Or is this one of those problems that can’t be fixed?  

I hate to say that’s almost certainly a hardware issue. The first step is to take it into the Genius Bar for their free diagnostics. (Make a reservation here for the North Star store.) Be prepared to leave it for a while, as they have fairly deep diagnostics that they can leave running, possibly even overnight in the case of hard-to-find RAM problems. 

They’ll be able to tell you what’s up, and they may actually have a reasonable fee to repair. If not, they’ll probably tell you to take it to MacTLC. They will do a fine job, though if it’s a logic board replacement, you would need to be ready to a fairly hefty fee. You can find cheaper repairs on the internet — google “MacBook repair” for some examples — but you may not want to ship a desktop. What model do you have?

I have an Intel iMac, which I purchased in May 2006.  Thanks so much for all your advice, J. I didn’t realize that I could take my computer into the Genius Bar for free diagnostics. I was already resigned to having to take it into a local shop for a $55 look. 

My pleasure. I have only just recently heard that Apple sometimes charges a flat, fairly low rate to fix out-of-warranty machines, so it might not be that painful. If you would post a reply on my blog or on Facebook as to what they tell you, I’d be much obliged.

Meanwhile, tell me: do you have a good, solid, daily backup for your iMac? If not, then, while you’re at the Apple Store (you need to make a reservation online), please pick up a LaCie Quadra 500GB or a G-Tech. Here are my typical suggestions for backup software, if you don’t yet have Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard. 

It’s worth iterating my post about the expectable life span of your Mac:

After 3 years, you should have a new computer in your budget. After four years, be ready and willing to lay down some jack for a Mac. After five years, your Mac is past its prime, and will not be up to whatever awesome software Apple and other developer/magicians will have concocted.

Keep me posted!

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What’s a good media server these days?

This may seem facile for me to say, but for just a little more, you can have a Mac mini media server that doesn’t run on the dippy Windows Hone anything, which is almost guaranteed to be stunted and annoying. The mini solution is versatile and powerful.

That said, Western Digital makes a very cool network adapter-cum-media player for USB drives, to turn nearly any mass-storage device into a media server, with HDMI. I wanna try it out on a Drobo sometime.

Finally, I can see that, in the not-too-distant future, some Core 2 Duo Macs will start needing to be retired as primary workstations, and I would anticipate some of them being ready for repurposing as media servers. Similarly, one could buy a used machine for that purpose. 

The right form factor and cost for this idea is really the Apple TV, which is such a sad and crippled piece of hardware, I stopped recommending it a while back. I’m hoping the recent price drop signals inventory clearance, for a proper model to arrive before the shopping season. 

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Quick one about Disk Utility

Important to understand that “Repair Disk” and  “Repair Disk Permissions” are entirely different procedures. The former is about file corruption, which can ultimately put your data at risk, the latter about what processes & users have access to a file or folder, a problem with which might affect the performance or functionality of an app or the OS.

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Is Facebook Lite the saving grace? http://lite.facebook.com

Yeah, they misspelled it, and I hate that.
And yeah, their navigation still blows.
And oh, I just found that you can’t search for fan pages in Lite.
And most of the “Settings” panes are disabled.

 But a mostly clean, and definitely snappy, interface makes me hope that FB isn’t losing sight of what made everyone crown them over MySpace.

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iPhone OS 3.1 kills tethering hack dead | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews

When Apple released its highly anticipated iPhone OS 3.1 firmware update for the iPhone and iPod Touch, some users’ worries were confirmed: the tethering hack we blogged about in June no longer works.

After upgrading, if you navigate on your iPhone to the Settings app, select General, then Network, you will see that the menu item for tethering has vanished.

Developers have not yet been able to find a way to downgrade or re-enable the tethering hack. If you or someone you know has had a different experience, we would like to hear about it in the comments.

Updated on 9/10/2009 at 10:15 AM PDT: According to user comments below, tethering remains intact for some, but not for others. Varying versions of the AT&T carrier file seem to be responsible for the discrepancy. We’ll be seeking comment today from AT&T and Apple regarding these carrier files.

via reviews.cnet.com

Now, I would never, ever try anything that would violate my terms of service with AT&T. They’re so good and benevolent, and their customer service is so knowledgeable and responsive, and they’ve never done anything to make me wish Apple had been able to choose another provider… But if you were to try this tethering hack, be warned it might break your visual voicemail.

Oh, yeah: F*** AT&T.

Posted via web from j2mac’s posterous

Really diggin’ App Store Genius

It has already turned me onto SugarSync, and a few very fun games. I was getting very annoyed by browsing the store and not knowing what would fit my style. Very cool.

 It’s worth mentioning that, unlike Genius for music, you find App Genius in the App Store itself.

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Norah Jones is great, but…

No Beatles at the rock ‘n’ roll event today. Norah is many things, but rocknroll ain’t one of ’em.

 Welcome back, Steve. Guess you didn’t want to be upstaged by Paul & Ringo, as epic as that would have been.

 Still, glad to see new iTunes and iPhone versions, and I like the new nano-cum-camera, even if it’s obvious they didn’t want to pull sales from the iPhone by giving the Touch a camera.

 http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/09/live-coverage-of-its-only-rock-and-roll-media-event/

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iTunes 9 fixed a Genius problem

I had one music library that Apple wouldn’t deliver Genius results for. One forum said it was because of screwy characters in the track info. I did examine the XML file, and found a bunch of characters with diacritical marks, but it wasn’t worth the time to try to find and replace them all.
I just installed iTunes 9 on that Mac, and it brought Genius down lickety split.

I’m running home now to get iPhone 3.1 and iTunes 9 on my own machines.

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