Cooling down your Macbook

Ever find that your Macbook Pro can sometimes get hot enough to fry an egg on?

Overheating can be caused by a combination of factors. The internal factors include running CPU-intensive applications or Mac OS background processes. These include graphics/film apps (editing or viewing), Flash-heavy web pages, large Time Machine backups, Spotlight updates and background downloads (including some non-system Software Updates). The external includes the usual environmental factors: placing your Macbook on a surface that doesn’t help dissipate the heat, like your lap; allowing a build-up of dust on the fans or vents, etc

First, a word on prevention: make sure your fans are dust-free. A sure-fire way to check is to use a can of compressed air to give them a spring clean.

You can keep your Macbook cooler by using a cooling stand (one with built-in fans powered by USB). If you use your Mac on your lap a lot, get yourself a decent laptop cushion, like this one from Belkin. Or if you use your Macbook on a desk, place it on a surface that can help absorb the heat, like a granite slab.

SMC Fan Control is a useful little app that sits in your menu bar, tells you how fast your fans are running and gives you the option to manually switch the fans on or crank them up if you need some extra cooling.

iStat Menu is also a handy app to monitor the temperature of your Macbook Pro and keep an eye on what apps are hogging your CPU.

Switching from Firefox (a bit of a beast, especially with add-ons enabled) to the sleeker Chrome will help too.

If you use Youtube a lot, you’ll know how hot your Macbook can get. Youtube know this too, which is why they’ve launched a “lighter” version of Youtube (with less pull on your CPU), called “Feather”. Check it out here.

BTS – www.bts-fleet.com

BTS – www.bts-fleet.com.

In February 2012, we were approached by BTS,  an international fleet management company based in Kazakhstan and with offices in Kent, to redesign their Flash-based site and create a new one in WordPress that they could manage themselves.

Our aim was to keep the layout as lean as possible, whilst using the company’s colour scheme. Above all, we wanted its focus to be on the products and services that BTS offer. We redesigned  the graphics (including creating all the banners), set up a new site structure, then began porting over the content from the old site.

We’re pleased with the site and will watch with interest as BTS revise the content over the coming months.

Spring Clean Your Mac

Historically, Macs have had a reputation for just working with minimal maintenance. But as Apple’s market share has grown, the sheer number of applications available has led to a necessity to do the occasional spring clean. Every time you install an app (either from the App Store or elsewhere) and then decide to delete it, it leaves behind traces. Over time, these can slow your Mac down, in the same way that if you leave your internet cache for too long, it can become slow surfing the web.

There are many ways to maintain your Mac yourself (reviewing Startup items, running Disk Utility, removing any PPC apps etc) but using Onyx, Spring Cleaning or CleanMyMac can make it easier.

Spring Cleaning is great – it’s probably the least known of the Mac cleaning utilities, but it offers a huge range of software to maintain and clean your Mac OS.

CleanMyMac is a simpler option and probably more attractive if you just want to launch an app in one click. CleanMyMac not only strips out your caches and temporary items, it also locates redundant code in your Universal (binary) apps and deletes the portions of the code you don’t need.

Onyx is freeware. Its simple interface hides a powerful engine that can delete unwanted files and optimise your Mac hard drive.

One cleaning app I do not recommend is MacKeeper. MacKeeper has an  aggressive marketing campaign, which includes posting up glowing reviews on fake blogs and also on the comments fields on blogs. Look on any site (probably even mine after this blog goes live) that discusses Mac maintenance and chances are you’ll see a washing machine or handsome robot advertising MacKeeper in the Google Adsense banner.

Of all the spring cleaning apps, MacKeeper shouts the loudest, but it  doesn’t offer anything to deserve its increasing market share. In the Mac community, it has a bad reputation. Historically, MacKeeper was a direct Mac port of PC Keeper, which irked Mac purists, but with good reason: MacKeeper’s early iterations used PC code (including Wine), which caused huge slowdown problems on Macs. It was sloppy and rushed. Admittedly they have fixed this now (how could they not?), but still the only thing that MacKeeper does that Onyx, Spring Cleaning or MacCleaner doesn’t do better, is market itself to uninformed Mac users (especially those new to Mac). Avoid.

To add salt to the wound, MacKeeper charge you £8 per virus database update! Imagine Norton doing that on your PC and people would storm Symantec.

So to conclude, I would recommend CleanMyMac for a quick option and Spring Cleaning (currently on special offer!) if you are comfortable with a more hands-on approach to Mac maintenance.

New site launch: Big Orange Head

http://bigorangehead.co.uk/

This Local Whitstable band, Big Orange Head, employed the Whitstable Computer Company to build them a new website to publicise upcoming gigs etc. A 3-pager, for which we compiled the elements from scratch using our cool new photography studio. There’s probably an easier way to do this (i.e. buy stock images), but it gets our creative juices running if we can do it all ourselves.

Also it makes the site a one-of-a-kind. Just like the band.

We hope you like it. We really enjoyed building it.

Oh, one last thing: if you want a great band for your house, birthday, wedding or pub, get in touch with Big Orange Head!

@&?! The Police Virus

Today, I had a callout to rid a customer’s PC of the notorious “police virus”, a particularly malicious adware that launches on startup, connects to the internet and then locks your screen with a full-screen warning from your local police force (in this case, Kent Police) warning you to pay a £100 fine online in order to unfreeze your PC.

You’ve probably heard about it on the news. There are a lot of sites explaining how to get rid of it, and a lot of them end up selling you a licence to an anti-virus, anti-trojan, anti-spyware or anti-malware bit of software.

It is a clever virus. It disables Task Manager, it disables your current anti-virus software, it locks your screen mode so you can’t see any files and worse of all, it launches at startup so there’s no escape.

The best way to get rid of it is to do it manually. As always, if you’re not comfortable rooting around under the bonnet of Windows, stop reading now and email me at help@whitstablecomputer.com to arrange to get it done by someone who does.

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Restart your PC in Safe Mode.

The first thing to do is to rip the virus out of the registry. Open regedit. Look in the following registries and delete any references to (random characters).exe

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run Once

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Spend= (random).exe

Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\(Username)\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and delete the file that is made up of random characters, like this: diopsdi908209hj.exe.ink

Now go to  C:\Documents and Settings\(Username)\Local Settings\Temp\ and delete all TMP items that are made up of random characters (th010190910.tmp) or two digit numbers (24.tmp).

Also worth checking on your desktop and in the System32 folder for other instances.

Empty the trash, restart. Uninstall your antivirus software and reinstall it. Update virus definitions. Run a full scan. Job done.

 

Why Lion bites

If the Apple rumours are correct, later in the year we’ll see a new Mac OS arrive in the guise of the as-yet-unnamed 10.8. They’ve already worked up the big cat power ladder to reach Lion, so I wonder what they’ll call the next one: Sabre Tooth Tiger, maybe?

For the record, here’s the list of Mac OS X big cats:

Cheetah (10.0), Puma (10.1), Jaguar (10.2), Panther (10.3), Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5), Snow Leopard (10.6) and Lion (10.7)

If you’ve come to Mac from a PC, you probably don’t care about 10.8 0r 10.7 or 10.6 or 10.5. I repair Macs and train new users on Macs and Final Cut Pro for a living. As long as your Mac lights up and connects to the internet, everything else is just bitter geeks being precious. Right?

I bought my first Mac in 1997, I became an Apple support professional when Macs ran on 10.4 (only 3% of computer owners used Apple) and for 15 years before Lion came along, I endured being the Mac-leper at geek gatherings, the deluded Apple fan raving about how intuitive and stable my Mac was compared to your pathetic Dell laptop, Earthling. And all the while, Windows users shrugged and stared at their Microsoft egg-timer, vowing never to change.

And then along came the iPhone and iPad…and with them, Lion…

Oh, I understand the irony, that this meant an increase in the OS market share from 3% to nearer 10%, and nearer 50% for smartphone users. So why the long face?

Well, here it is. I neither love or hate Lion. But after two months of using it, I rolled back to Snow Leopard. I can see Lion’s advantages (well, one advantage: multi-touch gestures for switching between Spaces) and disadvantages (Dashboard widgets? bloated functionality? lack of backward compatibility? unnecessary pretty animations? Launchpad? LAUNCHPAD! Making my Mac, which has the processing power to make an iPad or iPhone cower with fear, into a fat, bloated, heavy… iPad?).

Lion feels rushed, it feels like a stopgap, it feels like a marketing tool designed to lure in new users. To paraphrase Hannibal Lector, Lion is a blunt little tool.

For anyone who has used Snow Leopard, even a year on, Lion stands out as a disappointing update. Aside from the compatibility issues, Lion does little to improve on Snow Leopard. Long before its 8th update (10.6.8) ironed out any wrinkles, Snow Leopard just worked. Its stability was astonishing. It was like a trusty, reliable workhorse, muscular and powerful. Lion, by contrast, is a prancing pony. A fun, flash and good looking  pony, but prone to crying itself to sleep in its stable at night because it feels so empty inside.

But Lion’s not a disaster. Hell, it’s not Apple Vista. But as an Apple professional, I am a bit embarrassed that this is the first experience many users have of a Mac. After 15 years of pushing Apple to anyone who would listen, I imagine it’s how Neil Armstong feels when people bang on how great  Virgin Galactic is. Suborbital spaceflight? Man, I’ve been to the moon.