Category: 726: Archive Utility: What Is It?, RotW: MacBook Pro Video Distortion, Hybrid Hard Drives

Did you know that Apple computers are the most popular choice on campus this year, with a majority of students saying they’d prefer to use a Mac at school? We would wager that it is due to their top-rated reliability and no PC viruses. While parents get Macs for students so they can focus on…

A few months ago, in “Tech Tails #716”:http://blog.smalldog.com/techtails/?c=tt716, I wrote about Seagate’s new hybrid hard drives that bridge the gap between a full-on solid state drive (SSD) and a standard platter-based hard drive. These high-capacity hybrid drives are just becoming available, and “we have them on our site here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/76668/500gb-2-5in-sata-hard-drive-7200-rpm-hybrid/at_tt These drives feature a very large…

This week’s repair is a first-generation unibody MacBook Pro that showed intermittent signs of video distortion in one user account but not in others. Our customer is a graphic designer, so we set her up with a free loaner computer while her Mac was in for repair. (Did you know that Small Dog offers free…

A long-time Small Dog customer asked me about an item that fleetingly appeared in his dock. It was a generic-looking green icon with a zipper on it called Archive Utility, and when he used Spotlight to search for it, it was nowhere to be found. Many of the items you download and receive in your…

Happy Tuesday, At long last, the beginning of the end of the gulf oil spill is at hand. It is an extremely unsettling and sad fiasco to watch unfold, and the long-term effects are yet to be seen. With some fisheries reopening, many consumers remain skeptical that the seafood is safe to eat–myself included. It’s…