Archive for the ‘Apple Hardware’ Category
Mac Pro: Annoying hard drive vibration fixed
Filed under: Apple Hardware | Tags: hard drive, Mac Pro, vibration
Leave a Comment For a while there had been an annoying buzz emanating from my Mac Pro. I knew it had something to do with a new hard drive I installed, and for a while I thought the drive might be defective, like an earlier one I had that was extremely loud before I returned it.
In this case, it turns out that I had not fully tightened one of the screws on the metal sled that you mount the drive on before sliding it into the case.
The way I found out was that I pulled the drive out of the computer and lightly rapped it with my finger; I could hear something slightly loose and thought it might be the bracket. After I tightened all the screws and slid the drive back into the case, the noise level was back down to normal.
Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors
Filed under: Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Apple Hardware, Color management, Digital Photography |
Comments (1) If you’ve carefully calibrated your monitor and you use the white Apple keyboard that came with the iMacs and Mac Pros, you may have encountered that nasty surprise when accidentally pressing the F14 and F15 keys: They change the monitor brightness.
Changing the monitor brightness is obviously a big no-no if you’re maintaining a color-managed environment, because the monitor no longer represents the conditions under which it was profiled. Even worse, you may not notice that you’ve hit the key, or you may not know how far off you changed the brightness. All you can do is re-profile the monitor. The constant risk of accidentally hitting F14 or F15 and invalidating your monitor profile is an unusual misstep for Apple, which promotes color management as a Mac platform advantage.
There used to be no way to disable or remap the F14 and F15 keys on the Apple keyboard, but it looks like this problem will slowly fade into history. If you use the new slim aluminum Apple keyboard, you can make it so that you have to press Fn to set brightness with F1 or F1. If you have the older white Apple keyboard, you can take advantage of new keyboard shortcut editing options in Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later.
Changing keyboard brightness control with the slim aluminum Apple keyboard
The slim aluminum Apple keyboard introduced in 2007 puts the brightness keys on the function row along with the Exposé, Dashboard, and media keys. Why is this good? Because now you can bury the brightness function. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard tab.
4. Click to enable the box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features.”
5. Close System Preferences.
After enabling the “Use the F1-F12 keys…” option, you must press the Fn key (to the right of the Delete key) to use F1-F12 to use the alternate labels on the F1-F12 keys, such as brightness and the media keys. That means if you accidentally hit F1, you won’t throw your system out of its calibrated state.
If you still want single-key access to Dashboard and others, just redefine their shortcuts. You can do this in the System Preferences pane for each feature (such as Dashboard & Exposé), or in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences pane.
Changing or disabling keyboard brightness control with the white Apple keyboard
It turns out that Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later adds a keyboard shortcut option to disable or change keyboard brightness control for the older white Apple keyboard. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Scroll all the way down to where it says Displays.
5. Disable the check box for “Display” Or, if you just want to change the shortcuts, click in the Shortcut column and press the new shortcut. For example, if you change Increase Display Brightness to Shift+F15, you prevent unintended brightness changes due to accidental key presses, but by adding Shift you can still control brightness with the keyboard when you really intend to.
6. Close System Preferences.
Note: You won’t see the Display section if you’re using the slim Aluminum keyboard, only if you are using the older white Apple keyboard.
Stuttering video playback on Mac notebooks
If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple notebook, it might be because of the settings in your Energy Saver system preferences.
Open your System Preferences and click Energy Saver. In Energy Saver, click the Options tab. Now check the setting for Processor Performance. If it’s set to Reduced, change it to Highest or Automatic. Video playback may be smooth now. (I have these options in my PowerBook that has a PowerPC CPU, but I’m not sure if these options are on the newer notebooks that use Intel CPUs.)
If you’re running on battery, be sure to change the Processor Performance setting back to Automatic or Reduced when you’re done watching video. The Highest setting drains the battery the fastest. Note that on a notebook, the Energy Saver preference lets you save different settings for Battery and Power Adapter.
You might see the effect of the Reduced setting any time you perform processor-intensive tasks such as audio or video rendering, or gameplay. In those situations, you’ll want to set Processor Performance to Automatic or Highest.
If you set Processor Performance to Highest and you still see choppy performance, the cause may be another application that’s using processor cycles. Open your Activity Monitor utility, view the CPU tab, show all processes, and sort the list by %CPU to see if any applications are using an unusually high percentage of CPU cycles.
Keywords: iBook, PowerBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro, laptop
Mac Pro: Why four hard drive bays are great for Photoshop
Apple announced the new Mac Pro tower this week. For a Photoshop user, the Mac Pro’s quad SATA hard drive bays are just as useful as the quad cores of the two Xeon CPUs.
Why would a Mac Photoshop user need to use up four drive bays? Actually, it isn’t that hard. First, we know drive number 1 is the system drive that also contains all user folders and their documents. But I like to keep my photo archive on a drive other than the system drive, partly because it’s huge, but also so that if crazy things start happening to the system drive, my photo archive is less likely to be affected. This also simplifies backing up the entire archive to one of my external archive mirror drives. Right now my photo archive is on an external drive, but if I buy a Mac Pro then the photo archive can go to internal drive number 2 and get some clutter off the desk.
I would use drive number 3 as a Photoshop scratch disk. Photoshop has its own virtual memory that’s independent of the virtual memory that OS X and Windows XP use, and it’s optimized for how Photoshop must deal with image data. If you want the best Photoshop performance, in addition to having tons of RAM you should also have a separate, fast hard disk that’s assigned as a dedicated Photoshop scratch disk (set this up in Preferences > Plug-Ins and Scratch Disks). Again, another disk inside the machine instead of on the desk.
What about the fourth drive bay? At the moment, I could leave it empty. But when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes along sometime in the spring of 2007, it will include the Time Machine continuous backup feature, which requires a dedicated volume. Why not stick a drive in bay 4 and make it the Time Machine backup drive? That would be perfect.
And that’s it…all four internal bays of a Mac Pro quickly used up to help optimize Photoshop and also OS X 10.5 when it gets here. With all the drives that won’t have to sit in external cases on my desk, I might be able to get rid of a whole power strip.
MacBook: Won’t start, flashing sleep light
If you turn on a white or black MacBook when it’s completely powered off (not sleeping), and instead of starting up, the screen remains dark and the sleep light is blinking, the MacBook’s RAM might not be installed properly or might have worked loose. I found this out when re-seating the RAM of a friend’s MacBook to try and fix a problem. I thought I had pushed the RAM modules far enough into their slots, but after the MacBook failed to start up I took another look and found out that you really do have to push firmly and carefully past some initial resistance until the RAM goes in all the way. You may have to push harder than you think is normal, but seriously, you have to push pretty hard.
And don’t use the levers to do this. Remember that the levers are only for popping out the RAM, not inserting it.
I wasn’t able to find a tech note at the Apple site about this, and that’s why this entry exists. In case it helps someone.
(Update: I don’t know if this applies to the newer unibody aluminum MacBook.)
Force shutdown / restart in Mac OS X
First see if it’s just one program, or the whole machine. If the foreground program is unresponsive, before you force a restart check to see if other programs still work, because a lot of times, only one program is stuck and the rest of the system is OK. It’s actually very rare for all of OS X to freeze up. Try switching to the Finder or another program in the Dock or by pressing Command+Tab to use the Application Switcher. If these work, your whole system is not frozen, only the foreground program is.
Forcing just one program to quit. Use the Force Quit command from the Apple menu (or press Option+Command+Esc) to select the unresponsive program and quit it.
Forcing the entire system to shut down. If you cannot switch to other programs and you can’t choose the Shut Down command on the Apple menu, force a shutdown by holding down the Power button for several seconds until the machine powers off. To verify that it really is shut down, press one of the keys that lights up, like Caps Lock or Num Lock. If the key’s LED lights up, power is still on. When the machine is fully off, press the Power button to start up normally. For an emergency restart on a notebook while the machine is still running, press Command+Ctrl+Power. Using either method, any unsaved changes in open documents will be lost.
Holding the Power button to force a full shutdown works on many kinds of Macs and PCs. Use this technique only in an emergency.
In normal use on a notebook, pressing the power button without holding it down is the same as choosing Shut Down from the Apple menu; you see the same dialog box. On a desktop, the shortcut is Control+Eject.
Failing to wake up from sleep mode. If a Mac doesn’t wake from sleep when it should, or pressing the Power button doesn’t start up a Mac that appears turned off, the computer may be in a state where the screen is blank but it’s still running. This sometimes happens when something’s gone wrong while a Mac was in or waking from sleep mode.
First press Caps Lock to see if it lights up. If it does, the machine is still on. In that case, press the Increase Screen Brightness button to make sure it’s not because the screen backlight is off. If none of that brings the screen to life but you know the machine’s getting power, your machine is in a sort of coma. You might as well do an emergency shutdown at this point.
Deep-calibrate your PowerBook lithium-ion battery
Lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries work best when you partially empty them and then top them off. They don’t like to be emptied every time you use them. There is one exception: You should run your battery all the way down to empty about once a month. This ensures that the circuit that measures the battery capacity has an accurate idea of what “full” and “empty” are for your particular battery, since charge capacity decreases over time.
The standard advice for taking care of lithium-ion batteries comes from Apple and batteryuniversity.com.
When doing this kind of maintenance, most Apple laptop users simply use their laptop until Mac OS X automatically puts the computer into sleep mode. I’ve found that this doesn’t always leave the battery meter with an accurate reading of the battery capacity. However, I have found a way to empty and calibrate the battery more effectively.
I’ve noticed that my PowerBooks, when on battery power, run much longer when the iTunes visualizer is running full screen. When iTunes is in that mode, Mac OS X somehow seems to let iTunes bypass the usual automatic battery cutoff level, and forces sleep much later. To try this battery calibration method:
1. When you see a low-battery warning or when the battery level drops to around 5 minutes remaining, start iTunes.
2. Start playing your music library. It should be a long playlist (like the entire library) so that the playing time is definitely longer than the battery’s remaining time.
3. Make sure the Full Screen command is enabled under the Visualizer menu.
4. Choose Visualizer > Turn Visualizer On.
5. Wait.
You’ll probably find that iTunes keeps playing many minutes longer than the remaining time indicated by the battery meter. Eventually, Mac OS X will sleep the laptop. As a result of the longer runtime, the battery meter should indicate a longer life than it would have if you hadn’t extended the runtime with iTunes. Using CoconutBattery, I’ve confirmed that the number of milliAmp hours assumed by the Power Manager is higher after this procedure.
I don’t know why Apple keeps two different cutoff levels for sleep when on battery. It’s a mystery.
