Category: Tech Support

While most machines that come through our shop are pretty straightforward to diagnose and repair, there is always room for surprises. We had one such surprise last week with a MacBook Pro that was brought in for two distinct reasons: the hard drive wasn’t recognized and the machine would not boot from CD. While that…

This week’s repair was especially frustrating. On a day with Jon and Rebecca out of the office, I was in the tech room turning screws and diagnosing machines on top of my normal duties. Rebecca had ordered a logic board to resolve a bad RAM slot issue in this Mac mini (discovered during a RAM…

My young niece called me last night for help, as friends and family often do, with her grandmother’s MacBook. The Dock and Dock preferences were suddenly inaccessible. While she could navigate through the Finder and launch applications, she could not enjoy the convenience of the dock. She’s not a Mac user, and was in a…

I am a die-hard MobileMe fan. I use MobileMe to wirelessly sync my contacts, calendars, mail and more among three computers and my iPhone. In general, MobileMe syncing is phenomenal. Unfortunately, it’s not flawless. The first thing to do when troubleshooting a MobileMe issue is to identify which device (i.e. Computer or iPhone) is having…

Apple’s Time Capsule was released in 2007 in 500GB and 1TB capacities which were, at the time, sufficiently capacious to accommodate backups of most anyone’s Mac or Macs. Today, Apple sells Time Capsule in 1TB and 2TB configurations with substantially improved wireless speed due to compliance with the 802.11n standard, not just the draft standard.…

One of the toughest things a technician has to do is tell customers that their hard drive has failed and recovering the data will likely cost thousands of dollars. A Small Dog customer brought in her 24-inch iMac earlier this month because it would not start up. It was on the bench and diagnosed as…

Rebecca is one of the amazing techs at Small Dog Electronics. Here she shows how to correctly and efficiently replace the hard drive in a G4 iBook. Someone said it was impossible to do this repair in less than a couple hours. This took Rebecca exactly 23 minutes. Please note that this part one of…

I really liked the way the new MacBooks looked as soon as I saw them, and definitely like the performance upgrades. The other thing that stood out, of course, was something that wasn’t there—a FireWire port. Though I am a big FireWire fan, I’m going to leave the discussion and debate about that decision for…

In addition to the slew of new products announced on Tuesday, Apple also released the MacBook Battery Updater 1.4. A small number of MacBooks (both the latest unibody-style MacBooks as well as the “older” white and black plastic models) have batteries that can become inoperative after long periods of inactivity. This update presumably updates the…

One of the things I really enjoy about repairing computers is finding safe ways to speed up the repair process. While I’ll always follow the Apple service manuals to a T, the first few times I take apart a new machine, most experienced technicians would agree that there is usually extraneous information in the service…