Just what is the problem? You’d think Apple Inc. could make a program for the Mac without any bugs! What are those coders up to! Yeah, yeah, yeah – its all Apple’s fault!

Now, wait just a darn minute! Are you sure some of the blame isn’t yours?

I have been getting lots of calls about Macs not working as they should. These are the same kinds of problems that I saw at about the same time last year – and the year before – and the year before.

I am hearing about Time Machine backups that fail, computers that are having hard drive catalog errors, and programs that suddenly quit. When I run Disk Utility First Aid on the drives, I am seeing lots of errors. I haven’t seen this many hard drive errors since early last fall. In fact, I have even had trouble with my own computers.

How is the weather?

In my case, I am 99% sure I know what caused my problem – and Apple had nothing to do with it. I live in thunderstorm country. That means power surges, spikes, and flickers are a way of life. They potentially occur every time we have a rain storm. Over the past few weeks, we have had at least 6 big storms. While I have not lost power, my lights have flickered and appliance clocks have reset. That means anything that is plugged into a power socket in my home potentially has been affected.

Now, I see that some of you are loosing interest in this story. At this time of the year, you don’t get rain, much less thunder or lightning – but you very probably are having surges, spikes and brownouts as overloaded circuits are being re-directed around the power grid. Just what is causing these overloads? It’s hot. Air conditioners are running full time, refrigerators and freezers are working overtime. We are just using more electrical power.

So how does this affect your computer? Well, your computer is storing its files on a hard drive, and hard drives are easily damaged by even minute fluctuations in power. You might have power strips for your equipment, but those do wear out. Each surge, spike and sag make the power strips less effective. I bet you can’t remember when you last bought a new one! But there is even more to this story…

Check out your power source

Let’s take an inventory of your power sItuation. I will bet that it is somewhat like mine. I have a beautiful office filled with wonderful furniture that we bought less than 4 years ago. The problem is, my computer equipment has all changed in the past four years.

Back then, I had a 17” iMac G4 and one Epson Ink Jet printer. I also used a 15” PowerBook G4. I had one external hard drive.

My equipment has exploded in recent years! Now I have a 20” Intel iMac, a 17” MacBook Pro, a 20” HDTV that I also use as a secondary monitor. That little Epson has been replaced by an Epson All-In-One, a Brother Laser All-In-One, and an Epson Printer that will handle 13x19” paper. I also added a Primera Bravo DVD printer-burner, four additional hard drives, a second AirPort device, the Eye-TV. I almost forgot to add the four new hard drives, the Time Capsule, the cable TV box and numerous power supplies for my iPhone, iPod, and cameras…

I think you are getting the picture. A sphagetti soup of cords and plugs! While I do have an APC UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) and I have added several new surge protectors, too much of my equipment is no longer plugged into that UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). In fact, only a couple of the hard drives, my iMac and the power supply for my MacBook Pro are plugged into it. It looks like it is time to buy another UPS and to trace all of my power lines to make sure the most vulnerable equipment is plugged into a UPS. I also need to make sure I haven’t broken any of the UPS power rules.

But I don’t care if my computer shuts down!

When you are buying a UPS, consider why you are buying one. In my case, the most important part of a UPS is not the battery. It would be nice if I could shut down my computers systems gracefully while they are running off the battery, but we have very few “real” power outages and those often occur when I am not at home or asleep.

I use a UPS for its power conditioning capabilities. In effect, when my computer is plugged into my UPS, it is running off the battery inside the UPS. That battery is continuously being re-charged. Powering your computer from the battery instead of directly from the electrical line allows the UPS to clean up the power fluctuations. It absorbs the spikes, surges and sags and delivers electricity that is much more “even.” It is far better than a simple surge protector strip in protecting my equipment.

Watch where you plug things!

Every UPS that I have encountered has two different kinds of outlets. While some are a part of the battery backup system, there are others that only provide the surge protection features of the unit. However, due to the nature of the UPS, those surge protection features are much stronger than simple surge protector power strips.

So let’s see…

My UPS is several years old. When I bought it, a unit with 6 outlets was pretty good. But the model that replaced it has 10 outlets and the price is the same as what mine cost.

You willl need to do a little planning to most effectively use the UPS outlests. On the battery-powered outlets - Plug your computer and main monitor first. Then plug in the power adapter for your MacBook or MacBook Pro. In my case, that leaves me with one additional outlet since I have an iMac. I have used it to plug in my most important external hard drive. Your printers NEVER get plugged into the battery outlets. Printers, especially laser printers draw a huge amount of power as they start up and they can quickly drain the battery.

I am using my other three outlets for the rest of my hard drives.

Connect a surge protector power strip to a UPS? NEVER!

No matter how many power outlets you have around your computer, it is never enough! Since UPS units tend to have 6 to 10 outlets, you will always need more. The natural inclination is to just plug a surge protector into one of the outlets of the UPS – DON’T DO IT! Why? Because when there is a surge, they can get into a fight and it can get ugly! At best you can ruin the UPS. At worst, you can melt the plastic of your Surge Protector. To read all the gory details, go here and look for the Power strip surge-protection hazard heading.

Time for another UPS?

In my office, the left wall contains three wall units with space for equipment. My desk is a peninsula connected to the middle unit.

The first unit contains my two all-in one printers, my telephone and it is the place where I plug recharge things like cameras and iPods. It needs its own power supply, and this unit does not need a UPS. A good surge protector that is replaced every couple of years is sufficient for this area.

The last unit contains my Primera Bravo II DVD printer and burner and my wide format Epson printer. On top of the unit is my network. There is a Time Capsule, an AirPort Extreme, my cable modem and the cable TV box. This is the place where I need to add a UPS. Or perhaps I need to move the old UPS to this location and add a new 10 outlet in the middle unit.

The middle unit contains five hard drives, my two computers, my secondary monitor/TV, the EyeTV, a FireWire hub, a USB 2 hub and spare outlets for visiting clients, family members, and friends. No matter what I do, this area never has enough plugs!

Fortunately, when we had our house built four years ago, we had the electrician put 4 outlets on 4 separate heavy-duty circuits along this office wall. No matter what I plug in, I never see flickers and flashes. However, in the home we left, I had to be very careful about what and where things were plugged in. If you see signs that your circuits are overloaded in your computer area, a visit from a good electrician could help to solve some of your power issues.

I want to thank you for reading along as I assessed my office space and its power needs. Now, I need to replace two of the older surge protector power strips with the new ones I just bought. I need to put a new UPS on my shopping list and I need to make sure that everything is plugged into its proper place.

If you need some help reviewing and planning for your computer area power needs, give us a call at Bob LeVitus Consulting. We offer training, troubleshooting, and technical support. We’d be happy to give you a hand!

Pat

There are lot of good sources of Mac information and there are some people who you come to trust and respect. The crew over at Macworld produce an outstanding web site and magazine and Dan Frakes, who joined the staff in recent years, is one of the people I regard as a true Mac expert.

The July issue of Macworld magazine has a series of very good troubleshooting articles. Much of the content has also been made available on the web site. Dan Frake’s article, Five Mac maintenance myths has brought quite a few comments. In reading them, I was compelled to add my own. This is what I wrote:

I am a Macintosh consultant. I work with Bob LeVitus Consulting. We work with clients around the world. That being said, I feel the need to comment on your article.

There are some people who come to us with really strange issues. I listen to their maintenance routine and I shudder! They treat their computer just as if it were a car and needed periodic oil changes--exactly as many have said in earlier comments. Our earlier Macs (and present PCs) do need to be treated like a car. Periodic maintenance keep things happily ticking. But times and operating systems change.

When Mac OS X 10.1 came out, we had to change the tasks we did in Mac OS 9, but without periodic maintenance, our computers just ran into problems. With every Mac OS upgrade, the amount and type of maintenance required has changed as Apple has built more and more of the maintenance tasks into the daily running life of the Mac and coders have gotten better at writing routines that cause less damage to the operating system.

We have arrived at a time when I can say that those people who insist on periodic maintenance routines seem to have more problems than the people who respond to issues as they occur. I suspect many of the old-timers spend too much time doing the old things and forget the things that really need to be done. In advising our clients about a modern maintenance routine, I suggest the following:

◦ Establish a backup routine and use it frequently and consistently. Time Machine is a very good place to start.

◦ Install a program such as MenuMeters or iStat pro to help you keep track of what is going on with your computer. These programs will let you see when your computer's memory needs to refreshed with a restart, see when your computer is just busy instead of frozen, and see when background network activity may be causing your computer to be slow on the Internet.

◦ Restart your computer occasionally. Remember there is no contest for seeing who can run the longest between restarts. In fact, restart any time you are seeing something that does not seem quite right. A restart will probably fix the problem.

◦ Be aware that long startup and shutdowns are probably a sign that your Macintosh is running a maintenance routine in the background. Don't interrupt those until it has been a good 10 to 15 minutes. If you do interrupt it, start Disk Utility and run the Verify Disk routine in First Aid. If there are any problems, find your latest OS DVD and restart your Mac from it. Repair your hard drive. If Disk Utility cannot repair a problem after 4 to 5 tries, then and only then, attempt to repair your hard drive with Disk Warrior. Make sure your version of Disk Warrior is compatible with your current version of Mac OS X. Do not use the Disk Warrior CD that you bought for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on your computer that is running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

◦ Watch how much space is left on your hard drive. When you get down to 15% of the total, begin housecleaning. When you are down to 10%, be aware that your computer WILL slow down and be less stable. Get it down to 5% and you are headed for real problems!

◦ Keep an eye on Login Items. That list can get very long, causing extended startup times and since many of the items are hidden, you may be forgetting to keep them up-to-date.

◦ Although you don't have to be the first person to install Apple updates, do install them within a month of their release. They fix problems that you may not be aware of and they keep you Mac secure and protected from potential intrusions.

◦ Find a couple of assistance guides to use for when you run into trouble. For the beginning user, try the Apple Support Quick Assist here. For more advanced users, our Bob LeVitus Free Advice page here covers a wide range of things to try before calling in the pros.

One of the listservs that I read each day is the MacRogues On-Line Mac User Group and OS X DISCUSSION LIST. I while occasionally provide an answer, I am often frustrated that the all-text listserv format does not make it easy to "show" someone how to fix a problem. The topic that caused me to want to "show" the answer this time is the problem of screen flashing on Macs.

The message writer said "The screen will freeze before flashing a solid blue and then return to normal." Several people responded, most suggesting a hardware problem.

Instead, I suspect the computer owner or someone has been doing a little exploring and found their way to the Universal Access System Preference. This panel can be the source of all sorts of unusual Macintosh behavior!

There are several ways to get to System Preferences. The most obvious might be an icon in the dock, but I have noticed that quite a few Mac user tend to remove the icon from the dock, so let's use a different method of getting there. If you click and hold on the Apple Menu in the upper left corner of your screen, you can find System Preferences there. . .



By the way, when you see an ellipsis (…) in a menu, it is a signal that choosing that menu item will cause a dialog box with additional options to appear.




Choose Universal Access and then select the Hearing tab.



If there is a check in the box "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs, then each time you computer alerts you that you cannot do something, the screen will flash.

While I do not know if this has fixed the writer's problem, I know that over the years we have received many calls from the clients of Bob LeVitus Consulting who could not understand why their screens would suddenly flash. I wish all problems were as simple to fix as those caused by making changes in Universal Access, but if you are not expecting your screen to flash or the display to suddenly enlarge or several other unexpected problems, check out the settings in Universal Access.

Oh, one more thing!

Remember those ellipsis marks shown at the end of some menu items? We also use those as a tool in writing sometimes. Have you ever tried to use them, and then had them get all messed up as you tried to print or have you ever tried to make them look "right?"

Although they look like three periods, just typing three periods make them look to close...

Some people type period-space-period-space-period . . .

Those can break apart if they occur at the wrong place in a line. The real way to produce them on your computer is to hold down the Option key on your keyboard while typing a semi-colon – then they look a act just as they should…

– Pat

Running a consulting business with my friend, Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus, can lead to a few strange nights! Since I live in the eastern time zone, our friends in the Pacific time zone are just getting to their personal computers about the time that I am getting ready for bed! Of course, since our Skype telephone number has a 408 area code, it can really confuse everyone!

The truth is that I may head up the stairs around 10 in the evening, but that does not mean that I put away my computer till a few hours later. I just love the convenience of a MacBook Pro, a good wireless network and Skype! I do some of my best reading and writing curled up in my bed. Of course, my husband is totally tied to paper, but who needs to hold paper to read and write these days!

Last night my computer began ringing (via Skype) at about 11:30. I had been playing telephone tag with a client all day, and we finally got a chance to connect. Our client had recently moved from a Power Mac G4 as his "main" computer to a Power Mac G5. He began the process by doing an "Archive and Install" to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on the G5. There had been a few problems, but he thought he had corrected them. Then he used the Migration Assistant to move his files to the G5. One thing led to another and it was time to call for help!

The point of this blog post is to help you determine when it is all right to simply install a new operating system right over the old one, when an "Archive and Install" is a better plan, and when it is time to do the "dirty deed," or as Macintosh consultants often call it, a "nuke and pave." (In Apple, Inc. terms, when it is time erase the hard drive and install a new operating system.)

Back in October, when Leopard was released, Bob and I tried all three of the different methods, and our results were surprising!

My computer was fairly new and I don't run a lot of third party software that "enhances" the Mac experience, so I repaired permissions with Disk Utility while still in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Then I started my computer up off the the new Leopard DVD, ran the First Aid part of Disk Utility to make sure there were no hidden directory problems and then installed Leopard right on top of my old version of Tiger.

Now, for any of you who are Mac geeks, I can just see you shaking your heads and thinking that Pat is such a fool, but I did it this way since I knew that many Mac users would do exactly the same thing. (I do hope they repaired permissions and ran First Aid!) It worked out just fine! I had NO problems and went right to work learning about this new big cat, Leopard. So, yes, in the right circumstances, you can perform what is commonly called a "dirty install."

Bob did basically the same preparation with Disk Utility, and then he used the "Archive and Install" installation procedure. He was not so lucky! Although he thought that all of those third-party start-up items were up-to-date and okay, they caused him nothing but trouble! Probably, the moral of that story is that disabling start-up items is not a bad idea when your are going to do an archive and install. Then introduce them slowly so that you can make sure there are no conflicts with the new operating system.

My husband's computer, a PowerBook G4, was the third candidate for the upgrade. It was turning 4 years old, and it had been my computer until I had upgraded about a year and a half ago to my MacBook Pro. It has been quite some time since I had done any real maintenance work on it, the hard drive was pretty full, and there had been lots of software upgrades since it had last had the drive reformatted. It was also having a few problems that I was not sure were really gone.

Even though it would require much more work, that computer deserved – no, NEEDED a fresh start! I knew Ron would appreciate all the cruft being removed so that its 80 GB hard drive was as empty as possible and all the programs would be registered to him, and it would finally really be HIS computer instead of a hand-me-down with my name lurking in odd places. I installed all the applications from the CDs or disk images and I made sure to apply all the updates. Then I brought only his photos, music, documents, calendar, address book, and email back onto the computer.

It's now been a few months. I am not sure how Bob's computer has fared, but around here, Ron's computer is the most organized and has the fewest little issues cropping up. I know he appreciates having just the things he uses installed instead of all the programs that I have on my computer. And because everything was fresh and up-to-date, his small hard drive seems larger and he spends less time asking me to fix problems.

As for my computer, it could stand a good housecleaning! There a programs that I am no longer actively using. I really should archive some of my older documents and email, and I need to pare down my music and photo libraries. When did Steve say that Mac OS X 10.6 would be out?

As for the title of this blog post, do you remember the chorus from Kenny Rogers's song, The Gambler?

You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when youre sittin at the table.
Therell be time enough for countin when the dealins done.

Those words come to me sometimes when am trying to decide the best course of action in upgrading a computer!

Pat

There is nothing that causes more debate in a roomful of Macintosh geeks that the topic of hard drive defragmentation!

The most interesting part is that you can almost divide the room into the anti-defragging group vs. the "you must defrag" group based on the color of their hair!

Now just wait a minute--before you begin thinking age discrimination, you need to know that not all of us gray-haired people people are in the defrag camp, it is just that there are way too many of us there.

Let's go back to the earlier days of Macintosh computers. Back in the day when we had not even heard of Mac OS X. Defragmenting your hard drive was a necessary evil if you managed to fill you drive close to capacity. However, back in those days, a 40 MB hard drive was not un-heard of. Of course, our files tended to be much smaller, but we were not surfing a web filled with graphics. We were not downloading hour-long podcasts, we were not using digital cameras that routinely take 10 MB images.

If you used Mac OS 7 to 9 and you used your computer frequently, you needed to defragment your hard drive once or twice a year. Mac users got so used to defragmenting their drives that some even made it a part of weekly or monthly maintenance routine.

Many of the older Mac users are still in search of the old days. They would feel most comfortable if there was a set of things to do every week or month.

The engineers over at Apple know that every utility that helps you "fix" your computer is soon out of date, and running old utilities on newer versions of the operating system is a recipe for a mess!

Our newer Mac users have never had to perform periodic maintenance tasks on their computers, so they are much more content to let hidden maintenance routines take care of keeping things running.

I recently was lead to this article by Amit Singh, one of those REAL Mac geeks. Although it was written in the days of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, the article certainly applies to today.

It is long and deep, but the conclusion is the part that I want you to read:

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/

In case you did not make it to the link, these are the two most important paragraphs:

Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile, in most cases, because the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation.

It is risky to defragment anyway: What if there's a power glitch? What if the system crashes? What if the defragmenting tool has a bug? What if you inadvertently reboot? In some cases, you could make the situation worse by defragmenting.

So what do you do when your Mac is running slow?

1. Restart - something as simple as a restart can often speed your computer up. Remember there is not a contest to see who can go the longest between re-starts!
2. Make sure you have enough RAM. Apple recently began shipping all but its most inexpensive computers with 2 GB of RAM. If you don't have at least that much, it is probably time to think about installing more RAM and you can install it yourself!
3. Quit programs that you are not using. I am always amazed at how many programs the typical user has open on their computer. While Mac OS X reduces the amount of memory being used by applications that are running in the background, they are still using some RAM and if your computer is low on RAM, quitting programs you are not using can help to speed it up.
4. Restart your Internet browser every few hours. It does not matter if you are using Safari, Firefox, Opera, or even Mozilla, all browsers use more and more RAM the longer they run!

If you computer is still running slowly, it may be time for a checkup from the crew at Bob LeVitus Consulting. Although this will count as a troubleshooting call, we can still usually diagnose and fix slow computer problems about 30 minutes, so the cost of the service is usually only $60.00. If the problem is RAM, we'll even tell you about several places to order RAM and get you ready to install it yourself using nothing more than a screwdriver (except for the Mac Mini). Remember, these are Macs, so even adding RAM is easy!
--Pat

We get questions – lots and lots of questions over at Bob LeVitus Consulting. While many people really need help (and that's why we exist), there are some questions for which the answer is so simple, that I put up an entry here on my MacMousecalls blog.

In the case of SUID warnings, just what they are and how to fix them would require a LOOOONNNNGGGG explanation, but Apple Inc. provides an easy answer in its Technical Information Library article #306935 – just ignore them!
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