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Archive for the ‘Apple hardware’ Category

Mac Pro: Annoying hard drive vibration fixed

Posted in Apple hardware, tagged , , on June 2, 2009 | 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Stuttering video playback on PowerBooks and iBooks

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X on February 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple PowerBook or iBook, 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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MacBook: Won’t start, flashing sleep light

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware on June 1, 2006 | 175 Comments »

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 [...]

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Force shutdown / restart in Mac OS X

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X on April 25, 2006 | 19 Comments »

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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