Category: Macintosh Computers

Similar to maladies in the human body, rarely does hard drive failure happen quickly. And just as often, there are warning signs that things aren’t working as well as they once did. In any case, it’s important to recognize the signs of trouble and take the appropriate action.

Before I go on, it must be stressed that you should be backing up on a regular basis using Apple’s Time Machine, and quite possibly another cloud-based service (more on that later). There’s no excuse for not using Time Machine; it’s free, part of the Apple Operating System and is enabled with a “set and forget” process. The only extra required for Time Machine is an external hard drive, and those are dirt cheap these days.

While some failing hard drives can crash and die instantly, that’s usually not the norm. Most drives that fail give a couple of weeks worth of warnings, while others start the process months before they actually go bad.

There are warning signs that will indicate that all is not well with your drive. These include:

• General sluggishness, including the dreaded spinning beach ball and/or increased “freezing”
• Grinding loud spinning noises that occurs even when you’re not accessing the drive
• Seeing “permission errors” that never appeared in the past
• Failure warnings when attempting to move or copy data
• Increased boot up time

You can check your drive using any number of programs, including Apple’s Disk Utility, which comes preinstalled on your Mac and is found in your Utilities folder (which is located in your Applications folder.

Replacing the hard drive in your computer is not complex; new drives are well under $100, and the process to replace the drive and restore the data is fairly quick. As long as your data has been backed up, you won’t miss a beat. If you haven’t backed up your data – well, you have about a 50/50 chance of getting it back without having to pay thousands of dollars (which isn’t a guarantee that you can recover all of it).

Takeaway nugget: A two-tier process (local as well as cloud backup) is your best bet for guaranteeing you won’t lose your data. It’s far less painful to replace a hard drive and restore your data than it is to lose it all!

One issue I see constantly is users running out of hard drive space. Despite the fact that we’re talking hundreds of gigabytes, people who call me are often down to 1% of free space on their drives. This isn’t a mere inconvenience – it’s an important issue to address ASAP, as a too-full drive is in danger of crashing, which is a much more serious problem, as far as time, money and aggravation are concerned.

Barring removing the internal drive and replacing it with a higher capacity drive (a process that is becoming increasingly more difficult as Apple is making DIY upgrades harder and harder), the best way to reclaim hard drive space is to eliminate space hogging files and folders. This involves spending some time figuring out exactly where these files are located, and then deleting them and emptying the trash.

Before doing any of this, confirm you have quit all open applications. In the top left corner of the screen, the word FINDER should appear to the right of the apple. If any other word is there (such as Mail), pull down on that word and select “Quit,” which is the bottom choice.

Determine the capacity of your hard drive

Highlight your hard drive icon on your desktop (commonly named “Macintosh HD”) by clicking on it ONCE and selecting “Get Info” (Command-I) from the “Finder” menu. This will show you the capacity of your drive, how much space has been used and how much free space remains. Remember how much free space you have; then close the window. Repeat this info gathering process once you’ve completed all of the steps outlined below.

NOTE: If your hard drive icon isn’t visible on your desktop, pull down on the FINDER menu and select “Preferences.” Click the GENERAL tab and confirm that “Hard Disks” is checked (under “Show These Items on the Desktop.”

Empty your trash

Pull down on the FINDER menu (upper left corner) and select “Empty Trash.” If that command is grayed out, your trash is empty.

Check your documents

If you use Microsoft Entourage or Outlook as your mail client, you may have “rebuilt” mail identities languishing in your computer. To see what’s happening here, open your “home” folder (the folder with the “house” icon found inside your USERS folder) and then open the Documents folder. Inside, there is a folder named “Microsoft User Data” and inside that, a folder named either “Office 2008 Identities” or “Office 2011 Identities.” Inside the identities folder is where your stored mail resides; if there are any old “rebuilt” identities in there, you can trash them*.

You should also clean up your Documents folder since you’re already in there. A lot of files, many no longer needed, are relegated to this folder. Trash what you don’t need. And then empty the trash.

* Contact a computer professional before trashing any files. And you should also confirm ALL of your data is backed up!

Delete non-needed downloads

Similar to Documents, your Downloads folder is a repository for all sorts of stuff; downloaded documents and photos, software installers and even larger audio and video files. Your download folder is also found in your “home” folder. Virtually every download with a .dmg suffix can be trashed, unless it’s an installer for a software package you purchased. Other things that can go are old bank/credit card statements, pictures that have already been imported into iPhoto and music files that have already been imported into iTunes.

Unused user accounts

Open SYSTEM PREFERENCES (from under the Apple in the upper left corner of the screen) and select “Users & Groups.” Here, you’ll see a list of user accounts; the current user will be at the top of the list. If there are any accounts that are no longer needed, you can delete them. Note that deleting any user account instantly expunges ALL the data in that account, so you will probably want to check what’s in it before proceeding.

Where angels fear to tread…

If you sync iPhones, iPads and iPods to your Mac, there’s a folder that keeps the data from all of these devices – even ones you no longer own or use. The MobileSync folder is found in Home>Library>Application Support. You can trash this entire folder – it will eventually rebuild, but the “new” version will only contain the backup of your current devices, not any unused devices.

BUT – in order to access the “Library” folder on your Mac, you have to pull down on the GO menu in the Finder WHILE holding down the OPTION key. In the list of items you’ll see LIBRARY. Select LIBRARY and open APPLICATION SUPPORT. Here you’ll see the MobileSync folder. Simply pull it into the trash and then empty the trash. But you must understand that this folder will be recreated and start to rebuild once you reconnect any iOS devices to your Mac.

Offloading music and photos

You can also house your iPhoto and iTunes libraries on an external drive, but that process is a blog post into itself. I’ll cover that in a future missive.

Wow, a long one, but totally necessary. Remember – BACK UP YOUR DATA before attempting any of these steps. And if you’re unsure about ANYTHING, contact a competent professional (me) to handle this process.

To upgrade or not to upgrade, that is the question.

I am often asked to solve issues of full hard drives, under-RAMed machines and to help to prop up ancient Macs in order to wring another year out of them.

Sometimes it’s a quick fix that a few bucks and 15 minutes can solve, such as adding more RAM. Other times it’s more complex, such as installing a larger hard drive, a process that involves the price of the new hard drive as well as paying for the installation and data transfer. And then there are things like a bad motherboard or a dead power supply that cost several hundred dollars to repair at the Apple Store or other Apple retailer.

But the question that begs to be asked: “What is the formula to decide when you should upgrade as opposed to trying to fix it or upgrade it?”

There’s no magic formula to decide when to upgrade and when to throw in the towel and spring for a new Mac. A couple of factors to decide which way to go include:

Age of the Mac. If your Mac is over four years old, then anything short of a RAM install or larger hard drive is probably not a good idea. Things like motherboards and power supplies are expensive – usually around $400 or so. And when they go bad, they’re usually in computers that are over five years old.

Think of those sorts of issues the same way you think about a transmission in your car. When your transmission goes, you have to consider the age of the car before you decide to go ahead and replace the transmission. The same goes for your computer. But I would say that 90% of the time, it’s prudent to get a new Mac.

Money. Sometimes buying a new computer solves a lot of problems. Rather than spending the time and money to install a larger hard drive when there’s a new computer in your future, it’s best to pull the trigger a few months early rather than have to repeat the data migration process. Plus, a computer purchase, if used for business, is a tax deduction.

A good way to gauge your computer’s value is to see what similar models are selling for on eBay. But remember – that price also includes reformatting the drive as well as putting in the effort of listing it on eBay, packing up the computer and shipping it, a process that most people realistically don’t want to bother with.

I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t know a trusted source inside Apple, but I do read certain blogs that do have some insight on what’s to come. Most of these sites focus on the specs of new iPhones and the next OS upgrade, but the sites I give my attention to are ones that report on changes that affect the end user. Recently there have been some stories that will impact users of Microsoft Office, iPhoto and Aperture. (Though to be honest, Aperture is a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and nobody will even notice when it’s no longer with us.)

First of all, let’s talk Microsoft Office. If history repeats itself, 2014 (or 2015) will see the release of an upgraded edition of Office for Mac. Every three or four years, a new version is unleashed; while the old version isn’t immediately rendered obsolete by this, there are usually new features available that make users want to upgrade.

But considering that Microsoft issued Office 365, a subscription-based version of the suite off-cycle, it indicates that it is looking towards the annual-pay model, a la Adobe. And as I mentioned in my March 2013 blog post, the world is moving away from physical media (software, movies, music) into the cloud, where you rent or lease these types of things. Look at the popularity of Adobe Creative Cloud (albeit force fed on us, as there is no alternative short of looking on eBay for a legacy version) Spotify and Netflix. What they all have in common is the “rental” aspect – you own nothing, you just pay to play. And when you stop paying, you stop playing.

My experience shows that users find the entire Office 365 experience underwhelming (to say the least), with problems ranging from a clunky password reset process to broken server connections, requiring a phone call/service ticket from Microsoft tech support. And attempting to upgrade from Entourage into 365’s version of Outlook is an exercise in frustration for most users. So if Microsoft is planning on heading out on that dangerous road, it better patch things up before pulling the rug out from under us with an overnight switch from physical media to subscription model.

Now for iPhoto and Aperture: According to Apple, both will soon be lame ducks. The statement from Apple is:

“With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.”

Do you see the pattern here? Again, it’s a move from the physical to the cloud. While in theory that’s not a bad idea, most users still want something tangible – a chance to retain a physical copy of their photos in a safe place. Chances are slim to none that Apple is going belly up any time soon, but a cloud-only photo library has some worrisome associations that go along with it, including privacy issues, possible tech glitches that delete files, or worse yet, a change in terms that forces you to pay for exceeding size limits or be forced to deal with a non-intuitive storage management process (a practice that continues to dog iPhone and iPad users to this day).