Reading Time: 6 minutes My apologies, sometimes I take certain information for granted. When I see people on Facebook and other forums ask “what’s the difference between 4,1 and 5,1 Mac Pro?” or “Can I use a 4,1 CPU tray in a 5,1 Mac Pro” I think to myself ‘this is common knowledge, isn’t it?’. No, it’s not. Even in 2020 (and years to come), there will be plenty of people that first get started on upgrading an older Mac Pro or maybe even…
Reading Time: 4 minutes The world is losing it’s marbles with the corona virus going around so a lot of us find ourselves isolated at home. While this is certainly a good time to clean your home, I want to talk a bit about things you can do that you’ve probably been putting off (Mac related). Test your backups You use Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync and/or other ways to back up your data. This is great but do you know if those…
Reading Time: 6 minutes One day, your Mac will stop working or experience some kind of issue. This may happen suddenly without warning and when it does, you want a recovery and diagnostics drive handy. This drive has to be external and must match the interface your Mac(s) offer. For example a FireWire (FW) drive is not going to do you any good for a MacBook Air. A PPC will not allow you to boot from an external USB drive (even on the G5…
Reading Time: 5 minutes This question pops up every other week in the various facebook groups and forums I’m in. And I cringe every time I see it pop up. Why? because the comments are abundant and are typically full of misinformation. I can write a 10 page article about this but I will try to keep it brief. Here are a few of my issues with common comments: 1. Product recommendations “I use ClamXav”, “Avast has never let me down!” “McAffee is the…
Reading Time: 7 minutes Louis Rossmann released a video where he covers the MacBooks he recommends and those he doesn’t. The video is fast paced and I don’t expect anyone that isn’t well versed in logic board numbers or model information in general to keep up. You can watch the video several times, pause and rewind while you lookup the info and take notes but I figured I’d help you out a little here. It’s noon at the time of writing, he released his…
Reading Time: 6 minutes Recently on Mac Yak episode #11 (which unfortunately got horribly mangled by YouTube so it’s not easy to watch) the topic of Classic data preservation and transfer was brought up. The topic was “How to transfer files between old and new Macs” and got me thinking, how far back can we go to send files between different Macs and OS versions? What really is the best way to package this data to ensure it survives transfers to Windows PC’s, Linux…
Reading Time: 3 minutes You’re about to meet a buyer that has the Mac you want. A quick power on test to see if it even fires up, a quick glance at the About This Mac and System Report.. hmm looks alright. You hand over the cash, take your new Mac home and find it’s not in as good of a state as you thought it was. There is a very easy test you can do to get a general idea of the overall…
Reading Time: 8 minutes Before we dive in, let’s see Apple’s take on this question. From their website “Maximizing Battery Life and Lifespan” (linked to from their page “Apple Lithium-ion Batteries” that holds zero useful information) we get the following advice: Avoid extreme ambient temperatures. Your device is designed to perform well in a wide range of ambient temperatures, with 62° to 72° F (16° to 22° C) as the ideal comfort zone. Remove certain cases during charging. Charging your device when it’s inside certain styles…
Reading Time: 14 minutes With Macs becoming thinner and components being smaller and more crammed together than ever, you can expect internal temperatures to rise quickly. CPU’s and GPU’s become more energy efficient every year but they still run at the same, or higher, temperatures. Even with the latest CPU’s and GPU’s being far more energy efficient, when a little workload is applied temperatures immediately shoot up. Heat and dust are the primary computer killers (not covering electromigration here), specially when they work together….