MacKeeper

Would you trust a company that puts pop-up and pop-under ads on your screen to protect your computer from virus and spyware? MacKeeper seems to think that these ads will make you think you need to load and use their software. I find their advertising tactics rather like a bully trying to force their services on me. Many of the people I contact have no idea they do not need MacKeeper. In fact most have little or no idea what it does. Please don’t install anything you are not sure of on your computer. I consider MacKeeper to be a unneeded piece of spamware. To my knowledge this piece of software slows your computer down and gives you very little in return. If you are really scared about viruses then download and use ClamXav (www.clamxav. com); at least it is trusted open source software in the future, but for now you are better off just being careful.

Strange and crazy things happen to electronics

Remember if you are having strange problems with any of your devices, do a restart before going crazy and doing things like reinstalling software. It may be that you don’t need your local tech to talk you though booting into your recovery partition and running Disk First Aid.  If you can shut down your machine normally do so if not hold the start button down for 10 seconds then let go the machine should be off. Push the button again briefly to restart. If your iOS device locks up (freezes) or will not boot please do the following. Hold down the round button on the front of your device as well as the on off button on the top of your device. Do not let go when it asks you to slide to turn off. Soon it will go black and then you will see a white Apple in the middle of your screen, now you can let go. It will take a couple minutes for your machine to restart so give it time to boot up.

MS and misleading ads

What is in an ad? According to Microsoft you can type on a keyboard on their tablet device. Hum let’s think about that. You can type on the screen keyboard or you can attach a Bluetooth keyboard even to an iPad. Microsoft is doing the usual spin pretending that Apple products can’t or won’t use standard BlueTooth  keyboards. The real valid gripe they brought up, was iPad not having a work application suite on the device when you bought it, but Apple fixed that with iOS 7 devices by including iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote). If you don't own a device that came with  iOS7 you can purchase any part of iWork at the iTunes Apps store, the cost per App $9.99. As a note of interest if you own more than one device you can load this purchase on to every device attached to this account. 

Cold Weather

Will you be traveling with your Macintosh, iPad, iPod, or iPhone in the winter? You need to remember that you need to protect your devices from extreme weather conditions. Too hot and too cold are both bad for the device. Leaving your device in the car can affect battery life as well as causing malfunction of said device. Rain water can weep though coats, snow can melt and steam is just water that can cause device failure. So if your device gets very cold, let it warm up slowly to room temperature before using it. This really can affect hard drive data and possibly cause file corruption. Vibration like in the overhead bins in airplanes is really not good for your device.

Migration Assistant

Moving from older Macs to new ones using Migration Assistant is still fairly easy providing your old machine is still running Snow Leopard OS (10.6) or above. Keep in mind that the easy way would be with FireWire but if the new machine does not have FireWire you will have to use Ethernet and a patch cable. Apple gives you fairly good instructions, just remember this is not going to be a fast process. If you have an older operating system I will suggest moving all your documents to an external hard drive and doing things like exporting your Mail bookmarks and Address Book before the move.

Address Book and Apple Mail

A common problem that occurs in all versions of Apple Mail has an easy answer if you know where to look. I got a telephone call from one of my longtime clients, and here is her problem. Every time she tries to send an email to her daughter, Mail puts in an old, no longer current email address. She informs me she has removed the address from her Address Book but Apple Mail still puts in the old address. In an effort to help you, Mail remembers all the people you have sent mail to before so it can fill in that address line for you. However when you remove an address from the Address Book/ Contacts application, Mail keeps right on giving you a bad address. It will show the new address in the list but seems to default to the old one. The answer is located in the Mail program under the Window menu and is called “Previous Recipients.” Choosing this will give you a list of many email addresses. Click on the address and then click “Remove from List.”

Mavericks Compatibilty

After doing a clean install of Mavericks on our 2007 silver iMac, I logged into my App Store account to download the iLife programs and iWork programs. I was very entertained to see that iMovie (the current version) would not download because my iMac did not meet the guidelines for video cards. Everything else seems to have updated just fine. I was able to copy over a older version of iMovie and it works. However my Dock shows one “available” application update which of course I can’t install. Keep in mind we have several machines and that I did clone the old drive before doing the wipe and clean install, so I would not have been in trouble if there had been more incompatible items. This is not really a question, but rather a word of warning, that even if Apple says your machine can run Mavericks it may not run everything,depending on how the configured machine was built. I know that higher models in this series had fancier video cards that may work fine. Mine has a ATI Radeon 2600 with 256 MB GDDR3. (Update: The good news is that Apple seems to have fixed the installer for iMovie and it now installs and works on my 2007 iMac. So there is a good chance this was a bug that Apple had not tested for in this version of iMovie.)

Updates for Apple

Apple updates the Pages and Numbers applications, but at the same time introduces bugs that cause problems in older machines. This happens because they have become resource hogs. It appears that the programs try to access both iTunes and iPhoto at the same time which sends your CPU into overdrive. This ramps the processor usage up over 100%. At this point your machine is crawling and barely usable. Apple is aware of the problem but so far has provided no solution. Note: the newer your Mac is, the less likely you are to notice the slow down.