Tag Archives: Apple/Mac

Some of the Apple/Mac work I’ve done in the past

Apple iMac refresh & upgrade

An old Apple iMac 4,1 bought in. The owner was going to pass it on to another family member and wanted all personal information wiped clean

First stage was to refresh OS X version 10.4, which was already on the computer (this deletes the personal information)

Although the owner didn’t specify it, I upgraded the software from version 10.4 to 10.6 (the highest version that this particular machine could take). To do this meant buying an extra 512MB of memory but for a cost of £2.80 it seemed worth doing!


Having installed the extra memory, the upgrade starts, followed by downloading the latest updates. I also installed OpenOffice as the owner had said that it would be used for spreadsheets (and they had lost their MS-Office disk).
£15 charged in total


MacBook checked for viruses

viruscheckA MacBook white, running Mac OS Lion
The owner said it was slow, and needed it to be 100% reliable for his business.

Using an array of applications several viruses were removed, and some rogue tune-up tools removed.
£10 charged

Apple printer installation

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A customer had bought a wireless printer, but was struggling to get it going.

As with a lot of “Mac” problems, they turn out not to be “Mac problems” at all, merely computer problems. Tackling this was no different to installing a printer on any other Operating System (although Apple make it “look” different on the screen).

All up and working quite quickly, so £5 charged !

Apple Mail configuration, and training

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Several problems fixed on a neighbour’s Mac Pro:

  • Yahoo mail; continually telling the user that too many unsuccessful logins had been made, making it almost unusable. Also Apple mail which was showing errors. It turns out that these two are tightly related, the Apple Mail application had more then one IMAP account set up [to talk to btinternet’s servers] and one of them was incorrectly configured. Fix the problem and both Apple Mail and Yahoo are now happy 🙂
  • Training on using Apple Mail, especially using attachments. This is something which I needed to train myself on before being able to infer the knowledge to anyone else, but like a lot of “Mac” problems, it really is just a “computer” problem, i.e. there are parallels in the Windows, Linux, Android, and all other operating systems. The only difference is that Apple’s user interface is different. Anyway to cut a long story short, we went through the various ways of doing email attachments, and sent some test emails to prove that everything was working.

Charge for this was £10. There was no travel charge as I was within walking distance of the customer

MacBook Pro with power problems

MacbookProWhile I don’t have a lot of experience with Apple products, it doesn’t mean I won’t tackle them; they are still computers after all. This one wasn’t doing anything, completely dead.

Having first suspected the charger (and associated problems such as stuck pins, dirty connectors, damaged wires, etc), it turns out not to be that at all, but a combination of the SMC hardware and the hibernation system. A reset of both these parts was the solution.

The working laptop, send here during some application updates ->

I didn’t charge the customer for this, as the previous week he had helped to with trial runs of my remote assistance software (a service more valuable to me than cash, at the time)