Ask Jacob

Most bluetooth devices will have a Pair, Connect, or Link button somewhere on the remote control that will make it discoverable for a period of time. It is often in the battery compartment or on the bottom of a remote or mouse. Once you make a device discoverable, you then can use the Apple Bluetooth Setup Assistant to add the device. Some devices are only discoverable for 30-90 seconds, so you may have to hit the button a few times. Also if you are asked to enter a pass code, it is often four zeros, but refer to the devices manual.

Now if you just want to replace the Apple IR remote, that is available and much easer to use. It should work with your iMac right out of the box.

www.PowerMax.com/parts/show/l51929

The Leopard upgrade is often smooth, having done it on a dozen or so systems myself I can attest to that. I would, however, recommend that you buy an external drive and clone your system onto it. Use carbon Copy Cloner to make your clone.

www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

After you have a good clone of your computer’s hard drive, you can then upgrade your system to Leopard. If you encounter any problems, format the internal hard drive and install Leopard on the empty drive. Then use the Migration Assistant -which runs when you first start up Leopard- to pull the data from the cloned system you made on the external drive. Once you have everything running smoothly, you can format that external drive and turn it into your Time Machine drive.

Hope that helps… and you are going to love Leopard.

Something for you to try is resetting your printing system. You do this by opening the Printer Setup Utility: it’s in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Then under the Printer Setup Utility Menu, select “Reset Printing System.” That will take your system back to square one, in terms of printers, but then all you’ll need to do is add the printer again. You should not need to reinstall the Epson software. You may want to restart the computer in between resetting the printing system and adding your printer.

The types of drives suitable for Time Machine use have varied over the Leopard development process. Figuring out what may work in the future is tricky. If you have multiple internal drives, you can designate one of them as a Time Machine drive. Any FireWire or USB 2.0 drive can also work as a Time Machine drive. The one prerequisite for stable performance is that a Time Machine drive should be formatted as a Mac OS Extended volume, with a compatible partition table. The type of partition scheme you need to use changes based on the processor type. If it is an Intel-based Mac, then the drive should be a GUID partitioned drive. If you have an older PowerPC Mac, those drives should use the Apple Partition Map. The partition scheme is selected from the Options button in the Partition Tab of Disk Utility.

Because of the partitioning of those drives, it can be difficult to get them to work with other computer platforms (i.e. Windows). In most cases it’s best to keep a Time Machine drive dedicated to backup work. You can, however, have many computers use the same Time Machine drive. You can also do that sharing over a network, wired or wireless. The first step is to designate one Mac to connect to the Time Machine drive. This can be FireWire, USB 2.0, or an internal drive.

Set up the drive as a Time Machine drive via the Time Machine section of the System Preferences. Then go to the Sharing System preference and enable File Sharing. In the File Sharing’ details section, click on the “+” button under the Shared Folders section. Select your Time Machine drive and you will then see it on the list of shared items. From your other computers on the network you can connect to the shared Time Machine drive; the same as you would any other network drive. Make sure you save the user name and password in the keychain when you connect. Then you can use the System Preferences on that computer to designate the shared drive as a Time Machine drive.

This is a great solution for people with desktop and laptop Macs or a household of Macs. It may not be the solution that you need, because it will require at least two Macs running Leopard, but I hope it helps.

Cleaning a Mac laptop’s screen, or any LCD screen, requires some special care. You do not want to use a harsh chemical as the screen can spot with the wrong chemicals. Water is often the best liquid for light cleaning. It is important to use a soft cotton or micro fiber cloth, and not a paper product. Then you should soak the towel and wring it drip dry. Wipe in one direction with soft pressure. If water does not cut it, you can use a special cleaner like this one.

www.powermax.com/parts/show/m16266

Cleaning the outer case of any Mac can be safely done with your favorite household cleaner. We use Formula 409 for many of those jobs. The cleaner should be applied to a rag or paper towel and not directly to a case. Liquid of any type in the wrong place can ruin your Mac. When the cleaner is on a cloth, you have the ability to place it where you want.

I understand the trepidation in using that free email account from your ISP. I have changed ISPs dozens of times over the last decade and would have hated to change my email address each time. I have friends that I hear from only every other year and they should always be able to find me, regardless of what ISP I have. So yes a Yahoo or Google account would be a great choice for a permanent email address. I prefer a Google GMail account because they allow you free POP mail access. The POP mail feature lets you use the Apple Mail program to check and send email, so all the iLife applications should work well with Gmail. Go to www.gmail.com and get a Gmail account. Once you are logged into your gmail account click on Settings in the upper right corner. Then go to the Forwarding and POP tab and enable the POP mail for all your email. After that, you change the “When messages are accessed with POP” to “archive Gmail’s copy.” After that you never need to log into Gmail through a web browser. You will use Apple Mail to access your gmail account.

Google has a very helpful web page that can walk you through setting up Apple Mail to connect to Gmail.

mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13275

Although I love Carbon Copy Cloner, it is not always appropriate. This is particularly true for moving from a PowerPC Mac to an Intel Mac. The PowerPC and Intel Macs use completely different versions of Mac OS X. Both work the same but they are not interchangeable. In your case the best thing to do is use the Migration Assistant that runs when you first start up your new Mac. You can also launch the Migration Assistant after the first run; it’s a program in the Utilities folder. In addition to the personal files moved over, the Migration Assistant will also move over your application. The end result will be something similar to what you would of had if you used Carbon Copy Cloner.

The PCI cards you have will not work with the Mac Pro. Apple has started using a newer standard called PCI Express for expansion cards. PCIe is not compatible with older PCI cards. Although your cards will not work, I think the Mac Pro will do more than what those cards offered.

You can use that computer with the TV in a few ways. Which way you can connect to a TV will depend on what kind of video card you have. Some ATI cards have S-Video connections and that will connect directly to your TV. Then you just need to connect the audio. Apple also makes a DVI to Video Adapter if your video card has a DVI-I port.

The use of an integrated video chip-set, like the GMA 950, has caused many compatibility problems throughout the computer world. Although Apple is not the only computer maker to use this type of “video card,” it does seem strange for Apple to use such a low-end component in their Mac Mini. The problem with integrated graphics is that it does not have RAM dedicated to the video card, it instead it shares the system RAM. Because RAM has to be shared, the performance of those cards is slower than cards with dedicated fast video RAM. Its use will often causes a computer with integrated graphics to fall short on most games system requirements. This is true in the PC world as well. Integrated graphics are not completely useless; it will work well for most work you will do on a Mac. It just is not fast enough to play games at their peak performance and many game makers would rather not let it work at all, if it is going to work poorly.

So the next part of your question is whether you can change out the weak GMA 950 card for a more capable video card. Unfortunately you can not. The term “integrated graphics” is a suitable description of what you have. It is a hardwired part of your logic board, and not replaceable. It is possible that an update exists for that Harry Potter game. That update may let you run it on the GMA 950. You should check on the game maker’s website. If they do not have an update that will let you run the game on a GMA 950 Mac, then it will not work on a MacBook or Mac mini with integrated graphics.

Sorry I did not have better news for you, but I hope the information helped some.

The “.pps” file extension indicates that it’s a PowerPoint presentation and that would be readable by Microsoft Office. It will also be readable by Apple’s Keynote application. Keynote is included in the iWork package, which costs far less than MS Office.

www.powermax.com/parts/show/s-ma790z__a

You can also get a free 30 Day trial version of iWork to see if it will do what you need it to do.

www.apple.com/iwork/trial/

For free, there is always OpenOffice which is an open-source project to recreate and improve on the functions in MS Office. It is a little harder to use but once you have it working, it may be just what you need.

porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.html

Well I would join in with you with complaints about the plastic iMac keyboard, that is if I hadn’t left mine in the box. Although I have not had the functional problems that you have, I don’t like the way the older Apple keyboards work. I used the Macally iKeySlim from my previous Mac from day one with my 2.16GHz iMac. Recently I replaced my Macally keyboard with Apple’s new Aluminum keyboard.

http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/n40067

I love this new Apple keyboard and think it is worth every penny I paid for it. Apple is never going to admit that they did not get perfection on the last model keyboard but at least they have replaced it with a truly outstanding evolved version.

I also dislike the caps lock feature of any keyboard. Despite the occasional angry email, it serves no purpose. Well luckily you can turn it off in OS X 10.4. Go to System Preferences and select the “Keyboard & Mouse” section. Under the Keyboard tab click on the “Modifier Keys” button. Change the Caps Lock popup menu to “No Action” and click on the OK button. Now you will no longer write half a sentence in all Caps.

Missing items from the list view when those items are still on your computer is a strange problem. I have seen the Mac OS fail to draw all items in a list but that will always leave a big white space where the items are supposed to be. That problem is often fixed by using the scroll-bar on the right to move the blank space in and out of view. You may have to shrink the window so that only a portion of the list is visible. Then you can scroll up and down.

It sounds like you are having a different problem than what I have described above. In your case I would expect that it could be a file permissions problem. To fix file permissions go to Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. Select your hard drive and then click on the Repair Disk Permissions button under the First Aid tab. After it is done running, restart your Mac and see if you still have the same problems.

After that, if some items are still missing, make sure that you have not inadvertently moved your missing applications to a folder inside the Applications folder. I have seen some cases were half the applications were in the Office 2004 folder and a turned down triangle in one view would show everything but in another window the folder was not expanded to show everything.