Mac-Techs.com

I've been helping people move to Mac for quite some time. It's part of the process of consulting. I've rarely found anyone who regretted it or felt they wanted to return to the Dark Side. As a Mac consultant of course I'm biased towards Macintosh. I recognize the value in PC's and the utility they hold on many levels. As a technician, I simply prefer technology that behaves in ways I find predictable, understandable, and rewarding to use. For me, that's a Mac. Your mileage may vary.

Helping people remotely to solve problems on their systems is part of most if not all computer consultants' toolkit these days. It's simply too convenient to pass up. Rather than drive your fossil fuel burning contraption down the freeway, or pedal your bike if you are feeling a lot of gumption, you fire up one of many remote control applications and run the remote Mac or PC from your desktop. It's remarkably easy to do and there are many fine tools to accomplish this.

One of my favorites is Teamviewer.

So, for today's adventure, I assisted a client to move from their PC laptop to their new Mac laptop and did all this on the phone and via remote control using Teamviewer. First we set up the Mac to her liking. Installed Open Office and Virtual Box (virtual computer software), configured preferences and she learned some tricks and tips about her new machine.

We set up the virtual PC inside of Virtual Box so she could run Quickbooks, which meant installing Windows XP with antivirus and updates in the virtual machine environment with file sharing to OS X.

Overnight she installed Quickbooks in the virtual Windows XP.

Then we got logged into her PC and copied her data onto an external HD. Plug it into the Mac and 'pop' there is the disk. Copy her Quickbooks files over into virtual XP and Quickbooks was happy to unpack them and open them.

Copy her iTunes library from the PC into the Music folder and 'pop', iTunes was happy to recognize all the music and playlists.

Copy her photos into iPhoto.

Tweak things a bit. Format two volumes on the external drive for Mac OS X native GUID boot format, set up Carbon Copy Cloner for duplicates to one volume, and Time Machine for archiving backup to the other volume.

All in all one of the most productive sessions I can remember and completely done from my home with a client some 500 miles away. If that isn't cool, I don't know what is.

I helped a client over the weekend who had a TiBook meltdown. System wouldn't start, OS installer wouldn't boot the machine. All in all a potential disaster in the making.

What saved this client's bacon was the fact that his internal HD was okay. The laptop's hardware had failed, something in the motherboard probably, but not the HD. The client had an external backup he updated periodically, in this case about a week before.

A typical client-consultant snafu will be one where the client insists on controlling the backup process or doesn't do it. In this case, the one week lapse represents work that has to be redone in order for the client to get back up to speed on their work flow.

Ouch! A week of work all because the backup is out of date. Of course, in this situation, that was avoided because the client was off to the a local Mac retailer (not the Apple store), with a burning desire to get the latest Macbook. The retailer, primed by yours truly, was prepared to check the internal HD (good), do the data transfer and return the new laptop ready to go the same day. Way to go Marin Mac Shop.

If this had happened on Sunday, with the store closed, potential disaster loomed if this had been put off to Monday. As another note, the client has one file they use to do their business, a file accessed by proprietary software. So minimum recovery is having the current file available plus the installer plus a machine with OS X to use to reinstall and get back to work.

So, multiple points of failure.

What has occurred to me is new forms of backup made available as free services. I've mentioned in a past post about a free online service named Dropbox. What Dropbox can do for you is give you free storage online (2 gigs) that manifests as a Dropbox folder on your local machine. The folder synchronizes immediately to the online version when a file or folder changes. Your Dropbox can be installed on different platforms (Linux, Windows) so your Dropbox can follow you around from machine to machine.

Even more excellent is your Dropbox is available from the online website.

If my client had Dropbox installed, and he kept his working file in the Dropbox folder, he would have had a current backup that is constantly updated. That would have removed the immediate problem of not having his work be up to date. A great solution with a free service.

• Keep your Mac out of the hands of strangers and children
• Always have one duplicate backup and one archive of your home directory, preferably off-site
• Keep some heavy duty file directory repair software at hand, like Alsoft Disk Warrior
• Buy products from known and trusted vendors
• Beware of vendors who bundle unknown products with your purchase, like 3rd party RAM included with your Mac from some other vendor
• Be gentle with your computer and treat it with respect in terms of its environment and handling
• Run Apple updates after a short period of time to see if there are any nasty bugs that early adopters run into
• Research updates and upgrades before attempting an OS overhaul, like moving from 10.4 to 10.6.
• Respect the way the Mac arranges data and don’t defeat it by moving files and folders without knowing what you are doing.
• Keep abreast of current technology – don’t wait until your hardware and software is way out of date so you suffer multiple problems trying to upgrade your systems all at once.
• Use experts when necessary – they’ve suffered through multiple problem solving sessions so they know where Mac experts fear to tread, and what to do if they have to go there.
• Use backups religiously. Make it a personal rule to understand what they do and how to do it correctly, or suffer from lost data and probable personal anguish when your data goes missing or your work flow is interrupted for hours, days or weeks.
• Get off your computer, take a walk, relax and enjoy life. It’s just a machine.

I’ve run into a new behavior that was a bit puzzling in Macs running OS X 10.5 or 10.6. The symptom is that when the machine starts up, the monitor displays the gray Apple for a couple of seconds, then the Mac shuts off totally.

On investigation, it seems that the hard drive directory would have an unrepairable problem on the index, something that Drive Utility could not fix. In OS X 10.5, and 10.6, the operating system does a file structure check at boot when the system was forced to shut down or suffered a freeze or anything other than a normal shut-down.

This directory structure check takes the form of a progress bar that shows up in 10.5 and 10.6. If this check fails right off the bat, the system shuts down right away to prevent damage to the HD from booting from an inoperable index.

It’s a great technique. The first time I saw the Mac shutting down, I wasn’t sure I understood what was happening, but now it’s confirmed, the OS is doing a preventative shutdown.

I got asked yesterday whether a client had enough disk space on their 1ghz TiBook. 15GB free space! 60GB total capacity. It wasn’t too long ago that 1 GB was the distant horizon of disk drives, nowadays 1 GB is the new 1 megabyte. So it goes.

Still, 1 GB is not an inconsiderable amount of room. I told them to relax and let me know when they were down to less than 5 GB. Maybe then it might be time to think about increasing capacity. Even then, there’s lots of room to be found by optimizing the drive, removing old files, removing unused cache files, deleting duplicates and things of that nature.

I think the real motivation for the question…they wanted a new MacBook and needed an excuse to get one.