Are Apple’s DIY options not juicy enough for you?

If you really like getting deeper into your own Mac hardware repair, you’ll probably love a collection of Fixit Guides created by iFixit.

These guides are for serious do-it-yourself Apple laptop repairs. Each Fixit Guide has detailed disassembly instructions that walk you through the process of easily accessing and replacing components in your PowerBook or iBook. These guides are well written and well illustrated. iFixit has even developed new instruction manuals for Apple’s latest MacBook and MacBook Pros.

If you are the hands on type that likes to troubleshoot and solve your own computer problems, you might want to bookmark Apple’s Do-It-Yourself page.

https://www.apple.com/support/diy/

Pick your Mac and you’ll be taken to a page that lists all the parts Apple considers to be user installable. Instructions are easy to follow and have great up close photos and diagrams. Some older Mac instructions include handy QuickTime tutorials.

Every month we get calls from clients selling or buying an old PowerMac G4. How much is it worth? Here is a website with the answer: G4 Tower Value Guide Enter the model of the G4; the amount of RAM; the hard drive size; and the type of CD/DVD drive. This site gives you a price […]

Friday July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. In honor of our fellow left-brain professionals, we’ve put together a couple tips that may be helpful to those of us tasked with the challenging job of keeping creative teams stable, happy and productive.

First up: A Mac Maintenance Checklist. This is something we’ve been playing with at Creativetechs — for our clients who’ve scheduled a regular monthly maintenance visit to keep their computers fit and healthy.

Mac Maintenance Checklist (PDF)

The checklist is a simple, low-tech way for clients to make sure their computer issues get addressed. Plus it helps the tech avoid missing sporadic maintenance details.

When you need to capture an image of a long website design, don’t spend your billable hours stiching together multiple screenshots.

Mac-based designers should download a free copy of Paparazzi instead.

In Paparazzi, simply enter the URL and click Capture. Your web page loads in a small preview window. You can save the resulting image in a file format of your choice.

Tip: Use Paparazzi to preview what a site will look like at different resolution. Change the Crop Size pop-up to one of the presets (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768), or enter your own dimensions. You’ll get a sense for how well the site design works with different size displays.

Microsoft’s Exchange Server has become an industry standard for providing shared calendars, shared contacts, and centralized email across an organization. An Exchange Server can be a great choice for teams that already have a solid Windows-based infrastructure in place.

But what if you run a Mac-based studio?

That’s a question we get asked a lot. Especially by the owners of medium-sized creative studios. Their teams have the same need for centralized calendars and contacts. A good solution for Mac-based creative teams has been hard to find.

At Creativetechs, we’ve recently started installing and supporting the Kerio Mail Server. This question is becoming a little easier to answer.

We’ve long known how to customize the toolbar in Mac OS X’s Finder windows — but recently a client demonstrated a great example why we should. Try adding aliases of your most frequently used applications to the toolbar at the top of your Finder windows. It’s like having a tiny version of the dock hovering […]

In our tip My Mac Won’t Start! A Tiny Guide, we asked for other ideas for useful PocketMod booklets. Here is the first great example from András in the Hungarian Republic who writes the Macintalk blog. A complete listing of Mac OS X shortcuts in PocketMod format: Mac OS X Shortcuts! (PocketMod Edition) For instructions […]