Ask Jacob

When PowerMax uses the term refurbished we are indicating that a computer or device was bought from Apple through their refurbished program. Apple tests and restores returned units to their original configuration. Then they release the computer again with the same warranty as a new Mac.When PowerMax takes back a new Mac from a customer or removes one from display, we restore and repair that computer as needed and mark that system as an Open Box unit. Trade-in computers from customers are tested and restored, and then they are marked as Pre-Owned Macs.Some resellers will call Open Box and Pre-Owned computers “Refurbished,” but they lack the warranty that “Apple Refurbished” equipment has. In all instances above you should only assume that non-new equipment has been tested only. Certainly parts could have been replaced, but that’s only if something failed a test. The warranty is what you need to look at: is it a year or 90 days, or simply what’s left from Apple’s original warranty? Can you buy AppleCare with it?In our opinion, using the word refurbished on what is either an open box or a used computer is somewhat deceptive because of Apple’s own refurbished program. The result is the confusion you experienced!Apple Refurbished equipment will have a one-year warranty that can be extended to three years with AppleCare. If the seller offers no warranty, then it is just a tested used computer. Also if this is a private sale you are working on, please get the serial number from the seller and check it against our stolen equipment database (Stolen Serial Number Database).Hope that explains it.

The B&W G3 had some special considerations when it came to hard drives. The first generation could only handle one 6 GB hard drive reliably. Putting a bigger drive in those systems would eventually develop drive problems. The second generation of B&W G3 would take two drives in sizes up to 120 GB. Most second-generation B&W G3 towers had an extra drop on the ribbon cable for the second drive.

I recommend that you do not use the original drive connections in the B&W but instead get a PCI card that will allow you to add new drives. The good news is that you can get a SATA PCI card for your computer and the investment in new hard drives now can carry over to any new Mac you upgrade to. I would recommend the two-port SATA card from Sonnet (Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA card). Then you just have to pick your desired drive size. When selecting your SATA drive make sure that it has a Molex power connector.

The differences between Aluminum and Titanium PowerBooks are not night and day, but do represent a significant change in Apple laptops. Titanium G4 Powerbooks can boot into OS 9 and have a slim case design. They range in speeds of 400 MHz to 1 GHz. The Aluminum line replaced the Titanium models with three screen sizes, 12″ 15.2″, and 17″. They have faster wireless networking, faster processor speeds and, bluetooth, but will not boot into OS 9.Hope that differentiates them a bit better.

I hear this question often because many printer companies no longer provide support for Mac OS 9 on new printers. There is, however, a work around. HP and some other network printers support OS 9 computers over the network, although they do not say so. That means you can buy an HP printer with built in networking support and add the printer in OS 9 as a Generic Postscript printer. HP printers with an “n” in the model number will be a networked printer. Not all of them support Postscript printing and the ones that do tend to cost more, somewhere in the $300 to $500 range. Two printers that I have heard work well with OS 9 are the LaserJet 1320n and P2015n. Call into our sales line for up-to-date pricing and availability (800.844.3599).

It is not too hard to reset your passwords on a Mac mini if you’ve lost the password. What you will need to do is restart your computer and boot up off the grey Install Disc that came with your computer. First insert the disc into the disk drive. There may be more than one, but you will want to use the first one in the set, often with “Disc 1″ labeled on it. Once it is in the drive restart the computer and hold down the “C” key. When you hold down the “C” key on start up, your computer will boot off whatever disc is in the drive, as long as it is a bootable disc. It will take a little time to start up but eventually it will ask you to pick a language. Take your finger off the “C” key and choose English (I’m making that assumption because that’s the language with which you asked the question :)). Now you’ll want to look in the menu for a “Reset Password” option. You can usually find it under the Utilities menu, but it can be in different places depending on what OS version you have. In the Reset Password utility you select your user account and enter your new password twice. I would recommend writing the password down and placing it in your wallet for safe-keeping. Now you can quit the utility and the installer and restart the computer. You do not need to hold down any key. Now use your new password to login.

I know the sticky key problem all too well. If it is just one key, you can sometimes just clean it with rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip(tm). First disconnect the keyboard from the computer. Most keyboards let you remove the keys by prying the key up. Use a butter knife and get under one side of the key and use the knife as a lever to pop the key off. Have a friend or a free hand ready to catch the key. Use the Q-Tip(tm), dipped in rubbing alcohol, to clean the area around where the key was. There is often a shaft in the center of where the key used to be. Make sure to clean down that little shaft. Then clean the key itself in all areas. After the alcohol has evaporated you can replace the key by pressing it down until it snaps back into position.The second option is much more drastic and can kill keyboards. You can actually clean the whole keyboard by putting it in a dishwasher. Place it in the top rack with the keys facing down, and let the dishwasher run without any detergent. After it’s done, let the keyboard dry for about a week. Then connect it and see if it works. This does kill some keyboards. Many IT guys use this method because of the number of keyboards they have to clean. Keyboards are cheap and can be replaced, so if a few die in the wash it is better then throwing the keyboard away before attempting to clean it.Hope that helps and let me know how it goes.

You could use a Plasma screen as a computer monitor, but it would be so blurry you would not want to do much work on it. Here is a way to visualize it. At the highest broadcast level of HDTV, 1080i, you have a picture of about 1920 X 1080 pixels. An Apple 23″ LCD (Apple 23″ Cinema Display) has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels. If your HDTV is bigger than 23″ but has the same 1920 x 1080 resolution, then the picture will be enlarged but with less detail. If you are seated far enough away from the screen it could work, but that adds a distance strain to working with the display. Also many Plasmas will not work well with computers on a hardware level. Your Mac mini can take up to a 23″ Apple display which is close to the resolution of HDTV. A 23″ display makes a good TV as well as a great display.

The FireWire 800 Mirrored Drive Door (MDD) G4 has most of the same features as the first generation MDD G4s. Of course it has an added FireWire 800 port, but it also can take Airport Extreme cards instead of the slower original Airport cards. Also, it is quieter than the first generation MDD G4 towers. The biggest difference is that the FireWire 800 MDD G4s do not boot into OS 9. The original MDD was the last computer to allow booting into OS 9. That makes them the fastest OS 9 booting G4s and consequently they are a little more expensive than the OS X only version with FireWire 800. No G4 tower came with USB 2.0 native. A PCI USB card would have to be used.

For the most part, Spotlight is always active but it only indexes your drive at scheduled times. You can tell it is building an index of your hard drive if there is a blinking white dot in the center of Spotlight’s magnifying glass icon. It is possible to have Spotlight ignore areas of your drive or types of files. In System Preferences, there is a Spotlight section. The “Search Results” tab shows you the type of files found by Spotlight so for the most results you should have everything checked. The “Privacy” tab is where things will be excluded from Spotlight searches. Anything in the list will be excluded, so for the most results you should have nothing listed there. Other than those changes, Spotlight should find everything your user account can see. Hidden or locked files will not show up for you.

One of the many things I love about Macs is the variety of connections available in every model. Apple is constantly looking forward and making sure that users have as many connection ports as reason would allow. Because of that forward thinking, your G3 will have an ethernet port built-in. That will be the best way to connect to a DSL line. When you set up your mom with DSL just make sure the modem they provide has an ethernet port, and most do. That ethernet connection can connect directly to the G3 or to an Airport Base Station. If there is a phone line near where you are setting up the computer, then I would recommend just connecting the DLS modem directly into the G3. If the computer is away from where the DSL modems connect or there will be more than one computer on the network, you can certainly use an AirPort Base Station. You can still use the ethernet port on the G3 but you will need an ethernet to wireless adapter. Linksys makes the WET54G model that I have used before.Stay wired if possible but you have many options. Hope that helps.

It is fine to rename your hard drive at any time in OS X. The only thing you will want to do is make sure that no other computer has your hard drive mounted remotely. If you do not use file sharing then you are fine, but if you do, just unplug your network connection and turn off your Airport wireless card. That will disconnect your drive from other computers on the network that may be sharing your files. Then just click once on your hard drive and go to the file menu. Select “Get Info” and go to the “Name & Extension:” section to change your drive’s name. This should not cause any problems and is a common customization to make.

Your suspicion about the charger is probably correct. When it comes to replacing the power adapter for your PowerBook or iBook, you have to pay special attention to the wattage. Many of the G3 iBooks and the Titanium PowerBooks use 45 watt power adapters. Although the adapter’s plug is the same for newer iBooks and PowerBooks, those computers need a full 65 watt adapter. Most 45 watt power adapters will say that they work on iBooks and PowerBooks but their packaging is outdated. That might have been true when there was only 45 watt Apple portables, but new adapters are all 65 watts. For your computer, 45 watts will not provide enough juice to both power the computer and charge the battery. This is bad for the battery and can cause the power adapter to overheat, possibly breaking out in a ball of fire. For your PowerBook, you have to have a 65 Watt adapter and better yet you probably should get a Apple power adapter (Apple AC Adapter). Apple only makes 65 watt adapters now and they will work on 45 watt and 65 watt computers. Hope that fixes it but there could be additional battery damage that occurred from an under-powered adapter.

You’re most of the way there in your recording project. Audio sources plugged into the line-in jack are not automatically played through the speakers. Apple blocks that because people are often plugging in microphones, and if the mic is live you could hear that high pitched reverb sound, which is caused by the microphone picking up its own sound being played through the speakers. The sound builds on top of itself until the speakers max out. That is why most recording studios make people wear headphones when they are in the same room as the microphone. Because you are not using a microphone, you will not have that problem, and that’s why it is muted. All you will need to record the audio coming in is a program that will listen to the line-in and record it. Apple’s GarageBand is a great application for this kind of audio work, particularly because you can clean up the audio levels and clip songs to their proper length. GarageBand is part of the iLife suite and you may have a copy of it already on your computer. If you do not, you can always buy a copy (iLife 06). A newer version should be out any day, so call in to check for the latest version or any deals on older software.If you are on a budget or just do not want all the other iLife applications, you can download Audacity (Audacity). Audacity is a free audio recording and editing program. Give it a try and see if it meets your needs. It has fewer features then a paid program, but it may be just enough to get your tapes converted to MP3.Hope you like it.

Yes Intel Mac hardware is great for Windows Vista. People have been running Vista through Boot Camp and Parallels with a great deal of success. However, I wouldn’t recommend running the Vista eye-candy “Aero Glass” in Parallels on any Mac. Aero Glass should work well on Pro level Macs and iMacs in Boot Camp, but on Macs with integrated graphic processors, like the MacBook, you should nix the Aero Glass.

Apple’s Mail application stores massive amounts of email-related data in a variety of resource databases. It remembers our sent and received email of course, but it also saves all the email addresses we have interacted with, sorting rules, and junk-mail rules. The more data it saves, the more likely an update is going to break old databases, especially if you save most of your old emails. I have emails from the ’90s in my computer at home.One Mail database that often gets damaged is the “Envelope Index.” This is a SQLite database that provides important information about your emails, but it is just a listing of information. If you delete it, a new database will be created based on the emails you have stored on your computer. You can find your “Envelope Index” in your home folder’s library folder (/Users/”YourUserAccountHere”/Library/Mail/Envelope Index). Quit Mail and then drag “Envelope Index” to the trash. Now just restart Mail. It will act like it is importing new mail but it is really just rebuilding the “Envelope Index” file. Start up Mail and test its speed.Give that a try and let me know how it works for you.

It sounds like some part of your OS X system has become corrupted. This can be caused by hardware failure or just system file damage. To find out where in the OS X boot up process your system is failing, you can try booting up in Verbose mode. When booting up the computer, hold down the Command (AKA Apple) key and “V” key. You will see a detailed text list of services starting on your Mac. Pay attention to where it stalls. Knowing what service fails to load completely can help you find the broken files or the related hardware that could cause an issue.After the computer has been frozen for enough time to determine the hang-up, pull the power cord and restart the computer. Now what you’ll want to do is boot up in ‘Safe mode.’ Do this by holding down the “Shift” key on startup. If this works you can start repairing the drive. Running a Mac OS X Combo update is a good first step. Then keep troubleshooting.If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to boot into “Single User” mode. Boot up your computer holding down the Command key and the “S” key on start up. When you see a command line prompt, type “/sbin/fsck -fy” without the quote marks and press the Return key. Follow the on-screen directions.Here is a link to this info and some more tips from Apples site: Apple articleI hope this gets you up and running again. Please let me know.

There could be only a few things interfering with other accounts accessing your home wireless network without administrator approval. My best guess would be that you need to set your preferred network. This is how you can do it in Mac OS X 10.4 but it’s similar in other versions of OS X: When logged into the Administrator account go to the System Preferences. Select “Network” and change the “Show” pull down menu to “Airport.” You probably will have to click on the locked Padlock icon in the lower left hand corner to make changes. Enter your password when you are prompted and click OK. Now click on the Airport tab. Change the “By default, join:” pull down menu from Automatic to Preferred networks. In the window below you should see your home wireless network. If you do not see your home network, or you want to have more networks in that list, click on the “+” button. You can type the network’s name or if you are near the network you can select it by clicking the down pointing arrow to the right of the text box. Then enter the network password if you have one and click Ok. Before you close the Network preference window click on the options button. Make sure that the “Require administrator password to:” section has no checkboxes checked. Click the OK button to close the Options window and then click the Apply Now button to save all you changes. To be certain, you may want to repeat these steps for each account you have on your computer.Although other things could cause this problem of yours I think this will likely solve it. Let me know how it works for you.

Every so often my wife’s iPod gets stuck like yours has. In those situations I switch the Hold switch to the hold position and then back off hold. Then I press the “Menu” button and the Center button at the same time. Hold both buttons down until you see the screen flash, often it takes less then 10 seconds. The iPod should reboot and display an Apple logo.Next time if you forget the above, you can disconnect the iPod and let it sit until the battery runs out. Then hooking back to the computer will get it started again (although you’ll have to let it charge of course).To avoid your iPod locking up like this again, make sure you have the Hold switch in the off position before you attach it to the computer. I have found that this helps, but it could be coincidental.

Some bus-powered USB drives do require two USB ports. Many of the LaCie mobile drives use a special USB-to-power plug cable. The special power plug attaches to one USB port for power and a standard USB cable connects the drive to the computer’s other USB port for data transfers. In most cases the FireWire port on your PowerBook will have enough power to operate the LaCie Mobile drive without any assistance, but if FireWire fails to provide enough juice then you can add the special USB power cable. On every G4 PowerBook the FireWire port is near a USB port. That way if you have to use two cables they at least can be next to each other. Also, by using FireWire for the data connection the worst case is you will only have to sacrifice one USB port.

PowerPC based Mac minis only have one RAM slot. They take PC 2700 SDRAM in sizes up to 1GB. Intel Mac minis are like MacBooks without the screens and they have two RAM slots. Each slot can accept a PC2-5300 SO-DIMM up to 1 GB in size. Because Intel Mac minis have two RAM slots, they can work with up to 2 GBs of RAM. That can add a bit to the starting price, upgrading the RAM in a Mac mini to 2 GB will cost around $250. Although this is not an absurd price, I think 1 GB of RAM is the right price point. Upgrading a new Mac mini to 1 GB will only add $75 to its price.

Modern Mac computers support “Desktop Burning” for the creation of data CDs. No additional software is required. With Desktop Burning you just need to insert a blank disc. The system should ask if you want to open it in the Finder, iTunes, or Disk Utility. For data discs choose “Open in Finder.” If you do not get this option you can set it in System Preferences in the “CDs & DVDs” section. Change both the “When you insert a blank CD:” and “When you insert a blank DVD:” pull down menus to “Ask what to do.” When you have opened a blank disc in the finder you will be able to copy files to that disc icon. Then you just need to drag the disc to the trash. The trash basket will turn into a black and yellow burn symbol. Sometimes there is a problem with the OS X burn engine. This could be part of your problem. If when you attempt to burn you get the error you listed above, it could be a corrupted or missing part of the OS. One fix would be to install a Combo update of your OS, which could replace the offending OS component. It is important that you use a Combo update.If that does not help let me know what exactly the error says and when in the process it appears.

It is not possible to upgrade the video processor on MacBooks or Mac minis. MacBook Pros and iMacs can have the video RAM increased but only at the factory. Mac Pros and 24″ iMacs can have their video cards upgrade at any time in the computer’s life, as long as cards are available.Even at peak performance, a MacBook will not have the same video processing power that a MacBook Pro has. The good news for 13″ MacBook and Mac mini owners is that both of these computers have integrated graphics chips. That means the graphics processor shares the system memory instead of having dedicated video memory. So upgrading the total volume of RAM on your MacBook will improve your computer’s overall performance. Adding RAM to a MacBook is an easy procedure that most Mac users will have no difficulty performing.

900 feet is near three times the practical limit of ethernet, so your first option is out. That is, unless you want to place a ethernet switch every 300 feet to act as a repeater. Your other solution of going wireless with directional antenna is possible but probably expensive. Here is a link to a great antenna store which has a product called Q-Bridge (Link to Q-Bridge). This would handle your 900 foot network jump easily. Most wireless repeaters, like Apple’s WDS systems, will not work over this range without many midway hops between the two networks. In that case you may as well use the ethernet switches instead.Most professional network installers use fiber gigabit over fiber optic cable to span that distance. You would need to buy two gigabit switches that have a least one SFP port each. Then you would need to use two GBIC 1000BASE-LX FIBER SFP modules and 900 feet of 9 µm single mode cabling between them. This would be a pricey solution to say the least.If you try the Q-Bridge, let me know what you think about it or what you end up using.

Many things can cause a system to slow over time. There is even a term: “Bit Rot,” which describes the way data on a hard drive goes bad over time. Data on a drive, including the operating system files, will become corrupted over several years of operation. Your computer is not old enough for this to have happened but reformatting your hard drive every year, then reinstalling software and files, would prevent Bit Rot.Your problem is most likely do to a full drive. When you tell me that you have 4.5 GB of RAM and many external drives, I think that your swap file could be constrained. Every Mac user needs to keep two times their RAM capacity available on the boot hard drive. That means that you have to have at least 9 GB of drive space available. As you know, RAW photo files are large, and when you open many files at a time it fills up your Swap file, which is where your RAM stores data it needs but ran out of room for. When one Swap file fills up another is created. This means that you could need even more free space on your hard drive. For you I would recommend leaving 40 GB free on that 250 GB internal drive. Also you may want to reboot your system every day or whenever you notice it getting slow. That will reset your Swap file and let you start fresh.As for you network problem… You should have been able to see your attached drives when connected to your old computer over the network. You have to login with the administrator’s user name and password. Once you enter the correct info it will ask you what volumes to mount over the network. Just select the external attached drives connected to you old computer.Hope that solves it for you. Good luck.

The process of cleaning out a Mac can be very simple if you keep your personal files in the places Apple suggests. The first step is to create a new user account for your father. This should also be an Administrator account. To create a new Administrator account, go to System Preferences and click on “Accounts.” Click on the little locked padlock icon on the lower left corner of the window and enter your password when prompted. The icon should now be an unlocked padlock icon. Now click on the “+” button above the padlock. Enter your father’s name and a password for him. If you help your father with his computer often, consider writing down the password and keeping it in your wallet. The last thing to do before you click the “Create Account” button is mark the checkbox that says, “Allow this user to administer this computer.” Now you should see your father’s account in the users list.Log out of your old account for the last time and log in as your father. Go back to the Accounts preference and unlock the padlock icon again. Now this time you are going to click once on your old account and then click on the “-” button. As long as you have all your data moved, you can click on the “Delete Immediately” button. Now this will be a clean system for the most part. Some people do not keep their personal data in the user account as Apple expects. In that situation you will have to drag these personal files to the trash, one at a time.Hope that works for you and your dad.

Every Mac tower, and most all-in-one Macs, will take the same power cord and automatically adjust to the proper voltage. The exceptions are the Dual Core G5 and the G4 iMacs, both use different plugs.This is the cable that works for most Macs: MRP 6ft Black Power CordThe one thing to check, before you plug in the computer, is if there is a red or black switch on the back of the computer. It will be next to the power plug. If there is a switch it will be labeled as 110 V one direction, and 240 V the other direction (Note: the numbers may differ by up to 20 +/-). The North-American standard is 110 volts. Flip the power supply’s switch to 110 V if it is there, otherwise it will make its own voltage adjustments.Don’t worry, you are never boring.

You can use a FireWire-based iSight camera with Macs that have a camera built-in. To switch from one to the other is an option found under the iChat Video preferences. Although you may be able to switch cameras mid-chat, I would not recommend it. In most cases just leave your FireWire iSight as the primary camera. All Intel-based Macs can host video conference (multi-user) chats so you can start those for your family and friends as long as they have at least a 1GHz G4, dual 800 MHz G4, or any G5 / Intel Mac. Although you can host these chats over a wireless connection, you will get the best performance from a direct ethernet connection to your DSL modem.

DLS is often fast enough for four-way video chats but it will have slower data speeds the further you are from your phone company’s main office. Cable internet speeds can be faster than DSL because of that DSL distance issue. Get friendly with your neighbors and see what speeds they get from their cable internet connections. Switch if you find that they are outpacing your DSL connection.Hope that helps.

For the most part, any computer with a G4 350 MHz or G3 500 HMz processor or higher, but with speeds at or below below 900 MHz will take a original Airport card (Used Airport Card). Also, most Macs with a 1 GHz or faster processor will take an Airport Extreme card (Airport Extreme Card). The Mirrored Drive Door G4 (MDD G4) is the exception to these rules. For the MDD G4 you need to know if it has FireWire 800. If it has FireWire 800 it will take an Airport Extreme card, and if it does not have FireWire 800 then you have to use an original Airport card. There are a few other exceptions to the rules but this will take care of 99 percent of the Macs out there.

The Intel iMacs support the use of external displays. This feature allows you to have two screens running on your iMac, the built-in display and an external display. Only the 24″ iMac has an upgradeable graphics card, this is for future advances in video card technology.It sounds like you are wanting to use the iMac’s built-in display to view video from the Mac mini. This would not be possible without a video encoder of some sort. The best option would be to buy an external display that supports multiple connections, DVI and VGA. Then have dual monitors on your iMac most of the time and switch sources from DVI to VGA on the external display when you want to work with the Mac mini. The DVI connection can stay connected to the iMac and the VGA cable could run to the Mac mini.That would get you the most use out of that extra display.Hope that works for you

We have a team of web programmers that assemble the Bolt newsletter (http://www.powermax.com/newsletter.html). They use BBedit (http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/) most of the time, but they don’t use a HTML creation package for those emails. If you’re looking for a simple solution to create HTML emails, you can use a built-in feature of Safari. For it to work you’ll have to use the Apple Mail application for your emails. First, you will need to create a web page that looks the way you want your email to look. If this project is for a business, you may already have a page with the info you want to send. If you are creating original content then you should have a link for all the people who do not want to receive HTML emails; however the page does not need to be hosted online for this to work. Open the page in Safari. Click onto the File menu and then select “Mail Contents of This Page.” It will open a new email with the contents of that web page. Then just address the email and send it off.Remember to test your emails first before you send it off to a batch of folks.I hope that works for you.

Without FireWire on your computer, the next best method for file transfers is over ethernet. You do not need a hub, router, or switch however. You can use a “Cross-over” ethernet cable. This is one that will work: Crossover 25ft Cable for iMacThen you just need to turn on AppleTalk over ethernet on both computers.