Future Tech Systems

Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade – $209.99 for the software (our cost), $100.00 for installation.  Includes up to 2 hours of onsite time!  Let us come to you; bring your laptop in to your office, and we’ll come install it there, have us come on the weekend or during the week and we’ll install it at your house, your choice.

Before installation, we will evaluate your existing system for free, and if necessary, assist you with any upgrades or replacement of your system.

Buying a new computer and need some help?  Give us a ring!

Whether it is to prepare your PC for an upgrade to Windows 7, or just to squeeze some more time out of your machine as-is, I highly recommend having 4-8GB of RAM if your system will handle it.  If you have 32 bit Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7, your system will only recognize a maximum of 3.5GB of RAM.  To oversimplify, a 32 bit operating system uses 32 bit numbers to assign an address to each little “slot” in your memory to use.  32 bits was plenty in the past, because hey, who would ever have 4GB of RAM?  64 bit versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 remove this limitation.  It can address essentially more RAM than you could ever put in a present day computer.  Programs and operating systems designed to run on 64 Bit processors will run better and faster.

Think of the RAM as the attic or the garage – its where the computer puts stuff while its doing other things to come back to later.  Think of 32 bit and the 3.5 GB limitation as a 2 car garage, and think of a 64 bit systems RAM limitation as say, the state of Connecticut.  The RAM is the second fastest place the computer can access information from, aside from the cache memory on the processor itself.  With all that being said, a layman’s way of putting it is to load up a big program, like Photoshop, or Outlook if you have a lot of email stored in it, and listen to all the “clicking” that your computer is doing reading data from your hard drive.  The more information that can be stored in your RAM, the less of that it will have to do, and things will run much quicker.

If you are an enthusiast/tech person, you likely know exactly what type of RAM your computer takes, and will opt for someplace like NewEgg to buy RAM from.  For those of you that aren’t, there is a nifty tool that a memory manufacturer named Crucial has. (www.crucial.com).  While this tool will run in Firefox, I’ve found it works much easier with Internet Explorer.  You basically run their online scanning tool, and it will tell you how much memory you have, how much maximum your system will support, and various upgrade options.  Personally and professionally, I ALWAYS opt for the kits that remove your existing RAM and replace everything with new.  The reasons for this are: It’s brand new, so it will likely be better performance, you can generally fit more in by replacing your existing memory, and you don’t have to worry about mismatched speeds or brands not getting along with each other.

If you have a 64 bit processor, and you have or are planning to get at least 4 GB of RAM, I definitely recommend installing the 64 bit version of your operating system.  Beware though, particularly with Windows Vista, that some software and many drivers don’t run on 64 bit – you have to make sure anything important that you use (Printer, video card, etc.) has 64 bit drivers available.  If you are unsure, please contact us, the professionals, to handle upgrading your memory and operating system!

First of all I’d like to give credit where it’s due – to Jason Tomczak who has a wonderful article I used for a good portion of this particular repair job.  My purpose in this article was to document the process start to finish starting with taking the thing apart, as well as to share some humorous pitfalls I had in the process and how you can avoid them.  You can view the article in question here: http://jasontomczak.com/2007/11/23/4/.

I replaced a 250 GB SATA drive in the iMac that was failing with a Seagate Barracuda 1TB.  I had wanted to get a 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Black, but I had to go with what Best Buy had to offer.  My next project is going to be bumping the memory from 1 GB to 4 GB.  The upside of this project, aside from getting the computer working again (will mean more later in the article, trust me…) was getting a clean install of Snow Leopard on there.  My fiance has had Macs for a good long while, so there were 3 layers or so of upgrade on top of upgrade, with literally over 1 million files on the disk previously.

For ease of viewing, I have used full res photos.  I have also listed the sizes of the various Torx screws that are used, which I think will be helpful to you.

Anyhow, on with the article:

There are two sets of screws you need to remove first from the bottom.  There are four Torx T-7 screws along the bottom, and two Phillips #1 screws over the memory upgrade slot.

Once you have removed all six of these screws, you will have to try and “tuck in” the memory slot arms to be able to remove the cover.  If you pull from the bottom of the front cover, it should start to “flip up” towards where the web cam is at the top.

This is what you will see with the cover removed.  Note the fan in the lower left is choked with dust.  I would personally suggest hitting off the insides with some Dust Off spray.  Just make sure to keep the can upright, don’t shake it or turn it upside down, and use quick, short, targeted bursts.

As you begin to fold the cover upwards, you will see two wires attached to the webcam.  One wire you can just unplug (gently).  The other one is covered by that yellow tape.  Use the tip of a screwdriver or something to lift the tape so you don’t get your hand oils all over the tape, then you can still use it.  This connector is metal and a little tougher to get out, but be careful not to bend or break the connector on the way out.

Closeup shot of the filthy fan.  Note: electronics really dislike dust, because it is like a warm fuzzy blanket which traps heat.  Heat ruins things like hard drives.  Dust out your computer regularly!  If you have pets, regularly would be at least once or twice a year with an iMac, since its fairly well sealed, but at least every couple of months if you have a PC (which I do, that reminds me…)

Next we will begin to remove the display.  Surrounding the display are eight Torx T-8 screws.  You can lay the machine down flat and dump the screws out, but I chose to remove the screws with the iMac upright.  Personal preference, or you can use tweezers, etc.  Some use magnetized screwdrivers, but personally, I don’t think magnets and electronics mix and would rather fish screws out of the carpet.  Speaking of which, make sure you have a nice CLEAN work area.  This is important – its a lot easier to find the tiny screws you’ll inevitably drop if you have a nice wide open, clean desk, freshly vacuumed floor, etc.

Don’t take my word for it, but I believe this is grounding tape for dealing with static on the display.  There is some at the lower left and lower right of the display.  Peel it up carefully so hopefully you can reuse it – electrical tape has the exact opposite effect of grounding tape; it insulates rather than conducts.  The static reduction will make your display and your iMac in general attract a bit less dust.

After you have removed the tape and the screws, I recommend laying the unit down for this part.  The monitor has a plastic tab/strip at the top that is clear right above where “UP” is stamped into the metal frame.  This is so you can grab that strip and lift the display up.  It will come up from the top and almost “hinge” at the bottom.  LIFT IT UP VERY VERY CAREFULLY!  There are two important cables attached to the back, that are fairly delicate, and you don’t want to tear them out.  Jason opted to lean his display up against the base of the iMac.  I opted for the same method, but the display decided it would be more fun to fall over, rip itself out by the wires, and smash into my (padded) office chair before flopping onto the carpet.  I almost did this project on a wood table above wood floors, thank God I did it in my office instead!  Somehow, miraculously, the screen didn’t crack, the wires didn’t tear, and after putting the Mac back together, taking it back apart, reattaching the cables, and putting it back together again, the display is working.  These are the kinds of things that happen to your computer at a store that you never hear about.  I personally can’t resist sharing a near disaster with a happy ending.  Hey, nobody’s perfect… (except my bride to be )

Here is a shot of the hard drive.  One quick tip, which I wish I had noticed sooner.  You don’t have to take out the screws in the hard drive at this phase – that black plastic strip to the left of my Torx driver (Also T-8 size, you’ll need to take the screws out once the drive is out) presses in and pops out.  Make sure to disconnect the SATA cable and power cable before pulling the drive out, as well as the thermal sensor, pictured below:

You can’t see it in the picture, but on my particular drive the thermal sensor was over a cutout on the drive to where I was able to pop it off from behind.  I used a jeweler’s flathead screwdriver to pry it up, so I could re-use the adhesive on the back.  I don’t recommend using electrical tape.  Be careful – it’s a small circuit board so you don’t want to scrape/crack/break it.

Once you have removed the cables, thermal sensor, and black plastic bracket (Torx T-8 for both the screws in the bracket and these pegs), remove the mounting pegs and set them aside to install into your new drive.  Note the orientation of the drive – with the drive on its back, and the connectors on the right side, the pegs should be facing towards you.

This is the new hard drive complete with pegs and mounting bracket.  As mentioned before I chose a Seagate Barracuda 1 TB, 7200 RPM SATA drive.  At the time of this writing, I paid $99.99 retail, but should be $20 or so cheaper online.  I had no issue with this size as far as the OS or hardware was concerned.

Connect the cables, put the hard drive back in, and make sure the black plastic clip latches in.  Then put the thermal sensor back on in roughly the same spot.  I used the tool in the picture to press the thermal sensor on to kind of stick it down better, but however you get it back on there without damaging it is fine.

Reattach the two cables on the back of the display and stick them back down in their appropriate channels, etc.

Lay the unit down, and put the display back in, bottom first, taking care that the grounding tape at the bottom is folded out of the way, and put the eight Torx T-8 screws back in.  Once this is done, reattach the grounding tape.

Get your faceplate,  and in reverse of how it came off, reattach the two wires to the webcam.  Fold the faceplate back down, taking care not to tug on the wires.

Make sure to push these guys back in as you are attempting to close up.  Don’t want to break these for sure!

Put the four Torx T-7 screws and the two Phillips #1 screws back in on the memory door, and she’s back together!  Side note: Because of the display dropping incident, and having to take it apart again, I opted to bolt the display in partially with a couple of screws, and left the faceplate off, until I was sure things were working before putting the faceplate back in.

Time to fire it up!

Eureka!  She works.  Turn on the iMac, and put the Mac OS disk in the drive.  Hold down the letter “C” on your keyboard as soon as you hear the “BONG!” noise on startup.  When you see the twirly activity icon, you can let go.  Choose your language and continue.

Before you continue with the installation, you’ll need to partition the drive.  Open Disk Utility from the Utilities page on the install disk, and highlight the new drive.  Choose the third tab on the right, “Partition”, and create partition(s) as you wish.

After it’s partitioned and formatted, just install Mac OS and you’re done!  I went with Snow Leopard because I like excuses to upgrade things.  I hope you found this tutorial helpful.  My background is that of a PC Technician who grew up around both Macs and PCs, and my fiance is a graphic designer, and uses Macs at work and at home, so I’ve sort of had to learn as I go.

Stay tuned – in the next couple of days I will be posting a complete guide to replacing the hard drive of an Intel iMac 250GB with a brand new 500GB.  I plan on having proper screenshots, etc.  I will also be loading the new Snow Leopard on it with a clean install.  Rather than copying an image of the busted drive back on, we’re going with a clean install of Snow Leopard and just moving individual folders.  The reason for this is that this setup has been copied and re-copied as computers and operating systems get upgraded and replaced over the last 6 years or so, starting with Mac OS 9, and there is way too much unnecessary “stuff” on there.

Sometimes a clean install of an operating system, whether Windows or Mac OSX, can be like having a new computer again.

So after roughly 72 hours of running, DiskWarrior finally finished with the disk!  Now I have selected all the files it was able to recover, and in the left hand side of the screen chose the external USB hard drive I bought for this purpose, and am copying over all of the data it’s able to now.

Hey folks – Chris the owner here.

My Fiance’s iMac decided that it wanted to stop working this weekend.  Now, keep in mind, I am primarily a Windows/PC technician, but I am not your typical “Everybody should own a PC and not a Mac” type person.  There are people who like Macs, and people who like PCs, and there are pluses and minuses to both.  That being said, we have had this particular iMac for 3 years almost.  It was a Christmas gift for her.  On December 26th, the original hard drive died.  So, we brought it to the store, and eventually after much discussion and debate, they discovered that yes, a hard drive making a clicking noise and not booting up was in fact a dead hard drive.  So they replaced it.

Now, here we are less than 3 years later, and her computer starts going incredibly slow, and refusing to open Adobe Illustrator.  She is a graphic designer, so aside from a web browser, this is the most important thing on her PC.  I initially thought some Adobe update broke it, as their updates frequently refuse to install (on both PCs and Macs).  So, as I’m looking at it, I notice things like, oh, I don’t know, a 10 minute wait time to open the web browser, etc.

Long story short, I did some digging, and a program called OnyX which is a maintenance type piece of software (you can get it free from download.com) says I need to boot from the OSX install disk and run the disk utility.  (Hint: You can go to Apple menu->System Preferences->Startup Disk after inserting the CD to do this, or you can power the computer off, back on, and hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard after you here the “BONG!”) Guess what?  Disk utility says there’s a problem that it can’t fix.  So I go through some more hoops, do some googling, and decide to go to the local Apple Store for help picking out a drive utility.  I have to be honest – the Apple Store on a Saturday afternoon is not where you want to be.  To say it’s busy is an understatement.  So, I asked one of the salespeople which disk utility would work best, and asked if they could go ask one of the “Geniuses”. (I know, I laugh every time too) So, the sales rep honestly tells me this, that they are too busy, but if I go online I could read reviews of which software would work best.  This was extremely helpful – apparently there is this thing called the Internet!  Oh well – at least he didn’t say “All we have is what’s out there”.  But I digress.  So, after seeing other people online with the same sort of issue as me, some sort of Invalid Node error, everyone kept mentioning DiskWarrior.  So, rather than spend my hard earned money at the Apple Store, which its true, all they have is what’s out there, I bought it direct from the manufacturer for $99.

The nice thing about DiskWarrior, from a PC tech point of view, is that the disk is bootable.  So basically, same routine, put the disk in (after getting the OSX disk to eject, which involved holding down the Eject/Load button on the keyboard for an inordinate amount of time – Mac doesn’t trust you with a physical eject button because it might be too complicated for you to understand!) hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard until it gives you the twirling circle deal under the Apple logo, and you’re in.

It then scans your disk for problems and attempts to rebuild broken directories.  If you have a simple problem, I’m told this process runs in about 30-60 minutes.  Being that my drive is physically malfunctioning, I’m currently at 48 hours and counting.  It says underneath the progress bar “diskwarrior speed reduced by disk malfunction”.  After some more googling, and checking DiskWarrior’s website, this can take 1-4 days, and ask long as you can still move the mouse, it’s still allegedly recovering data.  I am told that once this process completes, we will be able to copy recovered data elsewhere.  I purchased a 500 GB external hard drive for the very reasonable price of $69.00 from Costco – it’s made by Seagate.

Stay tuned – when it finishes, I will post a continuation of this article on recovering the data.  I will also be replacing the 250 GB hard drive in it with a new 500 GB sata drive – so you will all get to see what the guts of an iMac look like.

We’ve been seeing a spike in the number of virus and spyware infections on computers recently, and wanted to discuss this a bit.

One that we have seen a lot of lately is “Personal Antivirus 2009″.  It is removable.  It is also difficult, relatively speaking, to remove.

So how did you get it?  Well, mainly people get it by clicking on bogus popup ads that look like windows error messages.  What makes this program more sinister is it is a full fledged application designed to look like many common pieces of antivirus and antispyware software.  It comes up with popup messages constantly saying things like “Detected 209 viruses” and various phony viruses it has detected on your computer.

While I have yet to find one product that cures absolutely everything, I have found a few good tricks that you can use to keep your computer in top shape.

You should be running some type of commercial virus scanning software, and some type of spyware/adware scanner and remover.

I will list a few products that I like, as well as some that I dislike, and why.  Many people are not big fans of antivirus software because it can interfere with your normal use, which I certainly understand.  However, you can’t just go without antivirus software on your computer just because it slows it down a little bit.  Every piece of software that stays running all the time on your computer will slow it down a bit, so you have to pick and choose.

I like the corporate versions of Norton Antivirus, like Norton Client Security.  I use this at my corporate clients, but for home users its cost prohibitive.  What I like about it is that as antivirus software goes, it is reasonably quick… with one exception being that if you schedule regular scans, and your end users computer happens to be off at the time, it will run as soon as they boot up their PC.  Generally, at 9:00 am Monday morning when they are already late, and trying to get their day/week started.  But back to what I like – the server where you put the admin piece downloads the LiveUpdate virus definitions for you regularly, and makes the client PCs install them.  You can monitor errors and who is and isn’t in compliance.  It is also tough for an end user to disable, which is what you want.

I like Spyware Doctor free edition, which you can usually get from download.com, but from time to time its only available as a free trial package.  That’s the part I don’t like.  Also, on my corporate clients, sometimes it doesn’t get along with Symantec Client Security, and it will constantly have a little play button icon saying “Starting Spyware Doctor” and generally slowing things down.  Generally removing and reinstalling it seems to fix this.  Spyware Doctor gets quite a bit of the stuff I see, although it sounds an air raid siren type alert saying you have dozens of threats, when most of the time it’s just ad cookies from regular sites that are coming up.

I like Malware Bytes Antimalware – you can get it from Malwarebytes.org. In fairness, I am an affiliate, so if you buy that product, I get a small token sum for that.  But in my defense, I discovered this product BEFORE becoming an affiliate.  You can use the free version for both scanning AND removal, which is why I like it.  The full version adds realtime protection and some other neat features.

This isn’t going to be a full tutorial.  If you’re here, and downloading the above products to remove viruses and spyware that already exist, I’m making the assumption that you know what you’re doing and what buttons to click.  If you are here because your computer is infected, and you have no idea how to do this kind of thing, your best bet is to give us, or any computer service shop that you trust, a call.  When my refrigerator breaks, I call an appliance repair place.  I can unjam the icemaker, but if it stops cooling, I know I’m in over my head.

If, however, you are here because your computer ISN’T having any problems to speak of, good for you – your best bet is to put an Antivirus and Antispyware program on your PC to keep it that way.

I severely dislike Norton 360, Norton Internet Security, and products like it.  They are bloated, slow your system down extremely, often don’t uninstall cleanly, and block things you don’t want blocked.  9 times out of 10 that I get a home user that can’t see other computers on their own network, its because they’ve installed one or more of these types of products.  And yes, even after clicking the buttons to allow firewall exceptions, etc.  They are garbage, they don’t work properly, and I hate them.  I know that’s not exactly a technical overview, but if you have me work on your PC, the first thing I’m going to do when I see that is install something that works, and uninstall those.

I hope you found this article helpful!  As always, please contact us with specific questions or if you need immediate help with your computers.

Are you a new customer?  If you’ve reached our page due to advertising, etc. we’d like to fill you in on a few quick things about us.

First and foremost, the most important thing to us is doing a good job, and having a good rapport with you.  We are not your typical computer nerds that you can’t communicate with or understand.

Secondly, email is probably the best way to reach us as we are often in the field, but we all carry an iPhone or Blackberry and answer our email like most people answer the phone.

If you are like most people and work during the day, we would be happy to come to your home or office during the day or in the evening, and even on weekends.  We also offer remote support, which is detailed in our services.  In a nutshell, if your computer can still connect to the internet, we can fix about 90% of the most common issues people have.  Things like virus and spyware removal can be done without having to leave the comfort of your own pajamas. (Or ours!)  As a result, we offer lower rates for remote support, as we don’t have to drive to your location and make ourselves unavailable.

We look forward to working with you!

One of our customers had been having issues with their Exchange Server 2003 Standard.  The symptom was that their server would stop sending or receiving messages.  After restarting the services, it happened again a day later.  Looking in the log files, the database for exchange had hit its limit of 18GB.  This was very unexpected, as they only had 3 users on their network.  There are two ways to fix this.  One way is simply to increase the storage limit:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912375

The other way, which we chose, was to archive the user’s mailbox causing the issue.

In Outlook, choose File->Archive, and follow your nose.  If you are not comfortable doing either of these methods yourself, feel free to contact us and we’ll either help you out, or help you find someone in your local area who can.