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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Apple hardware’ Category
Mac Pro: Annoying hard drive vibration fixed
Posted in Apple hardware, tagged hard drive, Mac Pro, vibration on June 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors
Posted in Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Apple hardware, Color management, Digital Photography on August 18, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
Stuttering video playback on PowerBooks and iBooks
Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X, tagged iBook, laptop, notebook, PowerBook, streaming, Video on February 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple PowerBook or iBook, here are some ideas. Check Energy Saver settings. 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 [...]
Mac Pro: Why four hard drive bays are great for Photoshop
Posted in Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Apple hardware on August 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
MacBook: Won’t start, flashing sleep light
Posted in Apple, Apple hardware on June 1, 2006 | 215 Comments »
If you start up (not wake up) a MacBook, and instead of starting up, the screen remains dark and the sleep light blinks, its RAM might not be installed properly. For more, read the full entry…
Force shutdown / restart in Mac OS X
Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X on April 25, 2006 | 24 Comments »
Does your Mac seem frozen? Learn how to get out of it when possible, and how to force the machine to restart if nothing else works.
Deep-calibrate your PowerBook lithium-ion battery
Posted in Apple, Apple hardware on April 19, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]

