If you’re going to be buying a Mac soon, please make sure you equip it with enough memory (RAM) when you buy it. Increasingly, Apple is soldering memory into the computer. The advantage of doing this is that computer cases can be thinner and one can get a bit better performance. The disadvantage is that it will no longer be possible … Read more
Do you have styrofoam peanuts or large blocks of styrofoam that you’d like to recycle? I order a lot of computer products online and unbox a lot of new computers that clients have bought. For many years, I’ve dropped off styrofoam peanuts at my neighborhood shipping company, Sip and Ship in Ballard. Many neighborhoods have private shipping … Read more
Do you own a 15″ or 17″ MacBook Pro? Does it suffer from distorted video, no video or random reboots? If so, the cause might be a defective video card. If this is the cause, Apple may repair it for free.
Read moreIs your web browser acting oddly all of the sudden? Do funny windows pop-up showing you ads? Do your Google searches look weird? If so, you might have inadvertently installed some adware on your Mac. Starting in late 2014 I noticed a rash of Macs infected with adware. Adware is software that makes ads pop-up … Read more
Last week’s Tech Tip explained how the DNS system works and introduced you to the most common DNS records: NS, MX and A records. This week’s Tech Tip lists 5 DNS management tips for small business owners to avoid common problems. If you follow these tips you’ll reduce the chances that your company’s web site or email will ever … Read more
Understanding DNS (Domain Name System) is important because it determines if your business can send and receive emails and if your business’ website is visible to the world. This Tech Tip explains basic DNS terminology like domain names, name servers, DNS lookup and common DNS records like NS, A and MX. I believe that most small business owners … Read more
Do you use a Comcast email account? If so, you might be interested to know that Comcast email accounts are now IMAP-enabled. IMAP refers to the way your email application, such as Apple Mail, interacts with the mail server. IMAP offers more sophisticated email management if you access your email account using multiple computers, tablets … Read more
Do you struggle to stay on top of the high volume of email messages that arrive in your Inbox every day? Many people struggle with this, including me. Here are some suggestions on how you can start to tame your Inbox. You don’t need to implement all of these suggestions. Instead, just pick a few that … Read more
Do you use either Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Entourage as your email application? Do you store thousands and thousands of email messages? Do you infrequently access many of these messages? If so, you could consider archiving these messages. Once the message has been archived then you can delete them from Outlook which will remove them from … Read more
Have you ever noticed that the “Other” storage section on your iPhone or iPad is quite large? Have you ever wondered what comprises this “Other” category? When you connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, you’ll see a bar like the one pictured. This bar depicts the primary storage categories and shows their relative … Read more
If Sophos detects that your Mac has a virus-infected file on it, here are instructions on how to use the Quarantine Manager to get rid of the infection. Previously, I’ve endorsed the use of an anti-virus application and specifically recommend Sophos or ClamXav.
Read moreSophos is a great anti-virus application for Mac users. Sophos is free for home users and quite affordable for business users. Sophos updates itself daily and scans every file that you download or open.
Read moreWhen you’re on vacation or out of the office for a day-long meeting would you like to send an auto-reply to email messages that you receive? If your email provider is Rackspace then follow these instructions. Rackspace is a premiere email provider and I regularly recommend Rackspace to my clients.
Read moreDid you know that Apple’s built-in search tool called Spotlight doesn’t search the entire hard drive? There are good reasons why Apple does this (which I won’t go into now), but there are also times when you want to be able to search the entire hard drive. When I’m troubleshooting a problem on a client’s … Read more
Are you retiring an older Mac that has a mechanical, spinning hard drive and its running macOS version 10.7 or higher? If so, here are instructions on how you can securely erase the Mac’s hard drive before you donate your Mac or sell it.
Read moreHere are instructions on how to rename your iPhone or iPad. The names of these devices are often copied from one device to the next so it’s possible that your new iPhone 6 might still be named Tim’s iPhone 4, for example. You don’t want that!
Read moreDo you use Gmail? When you click an email link on a web site does Apple Mail or some other email client open? If so, you should follow these instructions to make Gmail your default email client. I’ve provided instructions for the 3 most widely used web browsers: Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Follow the instructions … Read more
This week’s Tech Tip is a cautionary tale. Using Dropbox as your sole backup can be dangerous. I recently became aware of an incident that occurred in the summer of 2014. A user of the free version of Dropbox lost about 8000 files related to his PhD dissertation due to a bug in Dropbox’ Selective … Read more
Below are instructions on how to change your OS X user account picture. When you took your new Mac out of the box and turned it on initially, you were lead through creating a user account and either had one of the built-in photos randomly assigned to your User Account or you were offered the choice of … Read more
A few weeks ago Apple released an update which addresses the bash security vulnerability found in OS X during the last week of September 2014. The security vulnerability was nicknamed shellshock or the bash bug and reportedly affects all versions of OS X as well as many versions of Linux and Unix released over the past … Read more