MacDoctors Mac Sales and Service

In 2007, several countries and regions will change the dates on which they observe Daylight Saving Time. In our area, we will begin observing Daylight Saving Time on March 11. Daylight Saving Time observances vary between countries and regions and are subject to change by national and provincial governments.  Even areas of Canada will adjust what day they switch to Daylight Saving Time this year.

Because of this, it is important to make sure your computer switches to Daylight Saving Time on the correct date.  In order to accomplish this, Apple has provided updates for OSX (10.3 and 10.4) via Software Update on your computer.

At this time, we strongly recommend you make sure your computer is current by running Software Update and look for the Daylight Saving Time Update. If it’s been awhile since you last ran updates, you might have to run software update two or three times before you see this available for download.

The only exception to this rule is if you knowingly have some older software that may not run on a newer version of the operating system.  If this is the case, or if you should have ANY questions on this procedure, please call MacDoctors at 605-333-9600.

For more information, here is a link to a page from Apple Computer that explains this in more depth.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305056

A few months ago, I took a phone call from a young lady that works for one of our corporate customers. She had just received a call from one of their clients informing her that the email that she had sent earlier had contained a hidden virus that caused serious damage to their company’s data and was going to cost several thousand dollars to repair. Since she didn’t know what to tell them, she decided to call us to see if this could have happened. After all, she had a Mac and we all know that Macs don’t get viruses. As it turns out, her worst fears were realized and even though this virus did not infect her computer, she was a carrier of that virus and had passed it on to an unsuspecting client. I don’t know about you but I sure don’t ever care to get one of those phone calls…

The new Airport Extreme base station has arrived at MacDoctors. I’ve been testing one of these for the past couple of days and I have to tell you that I am extremely impressed! Here are just a few notable things for you…

1.) Improved Range. I personally haven’t been using the “old style” base station in my home primarily because the coverage was not as good as the Belkin Router I have. With the new “N” technology, this newer version has noticeably better coverage in the weak spots.

2.) Performance. Web pages come up sooner, login connection times are quicker, and download speeds are about five times faster than the old version.

3.) Features. Whether it’s security, parental control, or having a shared hard drive connected to it, this box is complete. I get asked all of the time about the best way to share files between two computers in a home environment. The problem in most situations is that at least one of the computers is a laptop so when the other user wants to grab a file, the laptop is out of the house! This way, those common files can be stored on a hard drive connected directly to the Airport Base Station so it’s always accessible. Along with that, accessing it is a breeze. No complicated scheme here. Best of all, it’s extremely secure from the outside world.

3.) Setup: Apple’s strength with wireless networking has always been the ease of setting up their products. The new Extreme Base Station is no exception. By using the Airport Utility that comes with it, the simple step by step instructions will have you up and running in just a few minutes.

Well as you can see, the long overdue facelift to the MacDoctors web site is now complete. One of the most often asked questions we get from customers is “Where did you learn this stuff?” Even though we receive formal training through a variety of avenues, much of our knowledge is obtained by working in real world environments like your business or home. Since hardware, software, and networking products change daily, new challenges face us just as often. The purpose for this section of our website is to share with you some of the “little” things that we encounter locally. We’ll do our best to keep the posts informative, brief, and updated regularly. By all means, we welcome any feedback. Thanks again for visiting!