Tips and Advice

• Back Up, Back Up, Back Up! You need copies of your data because the hard drive inside your Mac will eventually wear out. It is a fact of life. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've been approached by distraught individuals who knew better, but just never got around to making those critical backups. Human nature is such that perhaps over 95% of people are not going to manually do consistent periodic copying of data. Let's face it, it's time consuming, tedious, and easy to put off. The trouble starts when your hard drive stops working. You may get a warning with a tell tale click click click or you may not. I can set you up with an external hard drive on which I will clone the entire contents of your internal drive and setup a daily automatic backup. It'll cost you about $109 for a great quality drive you can rely on, plus about an hour and a half of my time (depending on speed of machine and data quantity). And best of all you'll be able to start up from this drive in an emergency, and clone back onto a replacement drive when necessary.

• Penny wise and pound foolish. Ben Franklin was one smart dude, common sense to spare. As it applies to trying to keep old Apple Computers going it can sometimes be very hard for people to think about buying new equipment and letting go of what seems to be a perfectly functional computer. But folks, do yourself a favor, give the 6+ yr old machine to a nephew, niece, son or daughter for use as a word processor and buy yourself a new computer, everything will be so much easier and faster you'll be glad you made the decision and you won't be spending good money on slow obsolete gear.

• If you need an All-in-One printer I currently recommend Epson Workforce. For pure black and white needs get a laser printer (cheaper to run), Lexmark makes a good one for a reasonable price. What you choose depends on your volume needs of course. While wireless is all the rage , you'll have less set up hassles and better reliability if you stick to a USB Cable or Ethernet.

• Please memorize or write down securely your Login password aka your Administrative Password. This is used for giving permission to install software or make changes to your System. Administrator accounts should not have a blank password (that is, no characters at all for the password), see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506, since you will be unable to use sudo functions in Terminal.

• One of the least expensive and best ways to increase the performance of your machine is to add Ram. I can order ram upgrades from my long time vendor who provides a lifetime warranty yet has great prices. Apple's ram prices are approximately double.

• I suggest you not set up your machine to have programs automatically launch at startup, if your machine develops a system problem and won't start up fully, having programs trying to launch at the same time can stop you cold.

• I still like to repair disk permissions after any software installations (up to and through Yosemite at least). This is done with Disk Utility in the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder. It can also be done from your first System DVD Installer (older versions of OS X) that came with your machine if necessary.

• Learn how to properly install software in OS X, what is a disk image, what do I drag where? Typically one downloads an installer with a .dmg at the end of the name. This file is doubleclicked, creating a Disk Image, this in turn needs to be opened. Inside you will either find the actual Application which you can drag to the Applications folder OR another installer icon you have to doubleclick, then follow the prompts. You will typically be asked to enter your Administrative Password at some point.

• Apple in their infinite wisdom ships the operating system (Pre-Yosemite) with what I think is a goofy default setting, so when in "Finder" (you do know what I mean here right?), go under the menu item called Finder and select preferences, in the window that opens, check off the box next to "Always open folders in a new window". Now you can compare multiple folder windows side by side and move files back and forth much more easily!