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3 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to OS X Mavericks

EDIT: Please read our follow up post on this subject here and bear it in mind.

We’ve had a few clients asking the past week about upgrading to Mavericks, so we thought we’d give you a couple of compelling reasons to upgrade now.

Before we go on, it’s important to mention that we don’t normally recommend upgrading to a new OS before what we call the “.4” release (that’s usually the 3rd or 4th update to the OS where Apple iron out all the bugs). However, on this occasion we’re not hearing of too many problems and application compatibility doesn’t seem to have caused any noticeable issues (remember the upgrade to Lion?). That said, your mileage may vary, so please, back up before upgrading!
1. Battery life extended
Apple claim that because of the underlying changes they’ve made to power use in Mavericks, you should see around an hour of extra battery life in normal use. That should make quite a difference to the average notebook user. We’ve tested this and, on our machines working the way we do, we’ve seen battery life go from 8 hours on a MacBook Pro to almost 11 hours. You might not see exactly the same improvements, but you should see a satisfying improvement in battery life. Obviously this only applies to notebook users with a battery that isn’t almost expired.
2. Multiple Monitors now work
When we’re in the office we run our notebook screen along with an external 24″ screen. This gives us a larger screen to work from and more space to be able to, for example, research something on one screen and make notes on the other. In previous version of OS X, second monitor support has always been, well, a […]

By |November 5th, 2013|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Backups & Storage Information Series Part 2 – Summary

In Part 1 we covered getting your Mac running with Time Machine to allow us some time to give you a fuller explanation of backups and storage, and put you in a position where you’d have sufficient information to set up a system that gives you the right level of protection for your needs.

Today, we wanted to give you some basic information in the main areas we’ll be covering in coming posts.
Overview
Equipment failure or data loss can (and does) happen to anyone, at any time (and often at the worst possible time). It’s impossible to predict every computer problem, disaster scenario or stupid human error and its therefore impossible to ensure you don’t suffer a problem. But you can make it easy to recover from these situations with a good storage and backup setup.

To keep your data safe, you should follow a three-part plan that includes versioned backups, a bootable duplicate, and offsite data storage. In addition we would recommend protecting your data by utilising RAID storage to reduce the risk of data loss.
Introduction to RAID Storage
In our next post in this subject we’ll explore storage in more depth, but right off the bat we want to suggest strongly that you protect as much as your data as possible using RAID systems. RAID stands for (depending on who you ask) Redundant Array of Independent or Inexpensive Disks. Where it gets confusing is that there are many ‘levels’ of RAID protection, some offering absolutely no protection against disk failure at all! The levels of RAID alone could fill a blog post up on its own, but we’ll summarise for you as follows:

RAID 0 offers no protection against data loss, but improves disk performance
RAID 1 offers […]

By |November 4th, 2013|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Sick of Spam? Let Us Block It For You

Morning all, hope everyone made it safely through the best extreme weather our country can throw at us!

This morning we wanted to mention a new service that we’re incredibly pleased with having run it live ourselves for a short period, and are now ready to launch to clients. Virtually every client we speak to, one of their biggest frustrations is too much rubbish arriving in their inbox on a daily basis. There’s a multitude of ways that we can show them to help block emails coming in that they don’t want, but each of these is a learning process (for the client and the computer) that, quite frankly, is more hassle than most clients are prepared to undertake.

CHNO now can offer a spam/junk/virus filtration service that needs next to none of your time, and blocks the vast majority of unwanted email. Every day, week or month (configurable by us on your behalf) you’ll receive a quarantine report showing all the emails that have been blocked, giving you the opportunity to receive those emails if they’ve been blocked incorrectly.

Our server accepts all your incoming email, checks them for viruses using two independent leading virus engines (Kaspersky and ClamAV), scans for qualities that suggest the email is junk or spam, and then forwards the email to your normal server (all in the blink of an eye). You won’t notice anything, other than a dramatic reduction in unwanted email. And the price for this service? £4 a month for the first address on your domain, and £0.75 per month for each subsequent email address.

Contact us for more information, or a demonstration.

By |October 29th, 2013|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Quick Update on Apple Announcements 22/10/13

Morning all

Last night we had a 90 min presentation from Apple on their updated products, and we tweeted throughout as we heard the announcement. Without wishing to rehash news that’s elsewhere, here’s a really quick summary:

Mavericks has been released (it’s free)
MacBook Pro’s have been updated immediately (they’re better and cheaper)
Mac Pro confirmed for release in December (much faster, but more expensive that previous generation)
iPad has been renamed iPad Air (faster, lighter, thinner). Available in higher capacity. Ships November.
iPad mini has been updated to a retina screen (old model still available, new model more expensive). Available in higher capacity. Ships November.
Virtually every bit of Apple Software has been upgraded (and all but the Pro apps such as Aperture, Final Cut and Logic is now free).

Lots of great news, and as we get to spend a bit of time with everything over the coming days we’ll give you more information (follow our twitter stream for immediate comments). If you have any questions, comments or sales queries on the above, please get in touch.

Have a great day!

 

 

By |October 23rd, 2013|Apple Hardware News, Apple Software News|0 Comments
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Backups & Storage Information Series Part 1 – Backups

In the first part of our series on data storage for Mac users, we wanted to talk in the most basic terms about backups.

First things first, let’s be clear about what we’re trying to achieve here. Our business is support; so to some degree it’s in our interest that your computers don’t work the way you want them to, or that equipment breaks – that’s probably what you’re thinking, right? Well, that’s not how we work. We sell ourselves as the folks who take your technology headaches away, and in order to fulfil that promise we need to be proactive on your behalf. And with that in mind, we’re going to tell you the first golden rule of technology:
Given time, anything electronic, mechanical (or both) WILL stop working.
That’s why we strongly recommend everyone backs their computers up; trust us, when you’ve seen as many clients as we have distressed by losing their financial data or, worse still, their personal photos to a failed hard drive, you become acutely aware of the risks, no matter how trivial they seem when it hasn’t happened to you.

Anyway, let’s try to see past the doom and gloom and tell you the good news. Firstly, you’re running a Mac so you probably have the greatest Operating System available in terms of performing simple, reliable backups. Apple have, since OS X 10.5 (known as Leopard), shipped their computers with a feature known as Time Machine. This awesome piece of software (once configured) runs in the background backing your machine up on an hourly basis, giving you the ability to restore back to a certain point in time should you need to (say, if you’d deleted a folder of photos a […]

By |October 22nd, 2013|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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