The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Joan, thanks for calling in. Here are the links we discussed on the air tonight:

Syncing photos to your iPod from your Windows PC

How to restore an iPod to its factory settings

Updating your iPod’s software

Also, the iPod assistant is worth a shot if none of these help out:

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/five_rs/

Let us know how it’s going!

We had a listener write in with a problem that sounds like it could be solved by a download and update from Apple:

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macbooksmcfirmwareupdate11

This updates the firmware of MacBooks to version 1.1, solving a heat and freeze issue.

Safe Boot (aka “Safe Mode”) allows you to start up your Mac with a simplified operating system, helpful for identifying and circumventing minor corruptions to startup items, extensions and fonts. Here’s info from Apple’s website on Safe Mode on the Mac, since it was discussed, too, press Shift during start up to enter safe mode on Mac OS X:

On November 28th, I posted a blog about a customer’s equipment being destroyed by her local cable company, and the data recovery that ensued. The intended effect was to remind people people of the importance of backing up their data. Nearly all of the responses to the blog expressed disbelief that the event happened, and questioned the authenticity of the damage to the components. Evidence of the catastrophe follows.

I asked this customer permission to use her detailed account of what transpired along with photographs that she took at the scene.

If you’ve tried to configure your free GoDaddy.com domain e-mail address with Apple’s OS X Mail, you’ll find it’s not the most straightforward thing in the world. There’s also not a whole lot of options for support. I recently found settings that work marvelously with Apple’s OS X Mail, and would like to share them here.

Account Type: POP
Incoming Mail Server: mail.yourdomain.com
User Name: full email address
Password: (your password)
Under the Advanced Tab
Port: 110
Use SSL: Not checked
Authentication: password

Outgoing Mail Server: smtpout.secureserver.net
Server port: 80
SSL: not checked
Authentication: Password
User Name: (user name from GoDaddy.com)
Password: (your password)

This past week we had a prospective customer putting one of our Zimbra hosting services through the wringer, testing e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization. He noticed when moving e-mail from his inbox to a subdirectory (aka directory or folder), he duplicated e-mail instead of the expected process of “moving” e-mail: copying and deleting.

We traced this anomaly to his testing environment: he had both the Zimbra web interface open and Mail.app. We suspected because they are both active IMAP clients attempting to synchronize their data with the server, organizational changes made in one while the other is also operating may lead to the unintended duplication of some e-mail.

Given he has already taken the somewhat drastic step of reinstalling his OS (clean install), and Shawn is still experiencing freezes on his Mac OS X 10.3.9 G4 tower, it’s looking more likely he has some sort of a hardware problem. Things to check: