There’s no doubt about it – Macs are great computers, but they re not cheap, and it’s hard to find them on special! What you may not know is that you can buy iMacs, Macbooks, Macbook Pros, Mac Minis –  almost the entire Apple range,  refurbished from Apple, often at reduced prices. I always buy my Macintoshs  from the Apple refurbished store rather than new  from a retail store.  In my opinion the computers at  the refurbished  outlet  are BETTER   than a new one – as well as being cheaper!  Here’s why, and here’s some tips on how to go about  getting one.

If you go  to the official Apple store webpage (the Australian one is here) ,  and scroll down the  far bottom left there is a  small link  called ‘refurbished mac’.

RELIABILITY:

These are computers that have been returned with a problem. This  problem has been fixed, tested, and now they are being resold. Sometimes they are current models. Sometimes they are older models. I have even bought a refurbished product which appeared to be totally new and un-opened – I assume it was excess stock after a new model was released.

If you look at the graphs of when macs fail here you will see that most Macs, if they are going to fail,  have a problem in the first year. My hunch is that a number of these  break in transit or  develop a fault in the first few days. If you buy a new  computer from the Apple Centre, you don’t know whether you’re going to get a Machines  with a fault,  whereas if you buy a refurbished computer,  it’s already failed,  and been repaired, and fully tested. I  know people who have bought a new Macintosh from Apple and had problems with it and had  to send it back for warranty repair in the first few months.  Buying a refurbished computer  may give you less chance of that happening –  the computer is already ‘ broken in’  yet it still has a one-year warranty from the day you buy it!

PRICE:

The price of a refurbished mac can vary, sometimes it can be 21, 30 or even 50% off the retail price! At other times it can be MORE EXPENSIVE! ( This happens when the price of a model is reduced –  and the Apple refurbished store still has the price from before the price reduction.)

For example this 27 inch imac  currently for sale is an absolute steal –  AU $1700. They begin at $2199 in the Apple Store:

On the other hand, this 24 inch is way overpriced at AU$2429 – that’s $239 MORE than the NEW 27 inch i3 model! This  is because the large iMacs are cheaper than they were a year ago. The ‘save $570′  is a saving off what the price used to be,  not today’s new price.

It’s also worth comparing the specs of the  refurbished mac with the current model. The best place to do that is at everymac here or the apple spec site here.

A refurbished Macintosh  comes with a standard one-year warranty and is also eligible to receive the extended  three year warranty,  so long as you upgrade it in the first year.

You can even save on the purchase of purchase an applecare warranty if you look around. For example a 3 year Applecare for an imac in Australia costs $AU268 but I found one on ebay for US$84 – under half the price. Applecare is international so you can buy it in any country and use it in any country. You just need to register it online with Apple when you get it.  As always, be careful what you buy from eBay, but if the seller  is PayPal guaranteed,  it’s hard to go wrong. The same can be said for software,  I just purchased iWork off eBay for $24 instead of $129, and 3 yr applecare for my iphone for  US$29 instead of AU$99.

Finally, it can be cheaper to buy memory for your Macintosh after you purchase it,  and I have  previously written an article about this here. If you live in Australia there’s often some good pointers to mac bargains here.

It’s slightly off topic but this is so well done I simply could not resist posting a link to it…

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/06/09/excellent-mac-classic-converted-to-ipad-stand/

So your old laptop is running a bit slowly. It might be that the hard drive is too small and all your hard disk space is all used up. Here’s a few ways to recover some extra Hard Drive space. Basically there are lots of files you can probably get rid of, and here’s now to find them.

You don’t even need to be totally free of space to do this, did you know that you should never fill your hard drive to more than approx 80% capacity or it will slow down performance?

1. Remove all the extra language files to gain a few hundred MB.
OSZ comes packed with almost 50 languages, chances are you only speak one or two. Here’s how to delete the ones you don’t use.
1. Download Monolingual from here
2. Run it and it will remove all the language files you don’t need. It defaults to keeping English, gets rid of Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic etc. (Don’t use the other features of monolingual – just the language removal.)

2. Use Disk Inventory to see where your space is being taken.
You probably have lots of old files lying round you don’t use much, some of them might be very big. THis program shows you what is taking the most space.
1. Download Disk Inventory X from here.
2. Run it, go have a cup of coffee – it can take a while.
3. Look at the results, they will be a picture like this:

You can mouse over the colors to see which files they are on the hard drive, and then manually delete the folders to create free space. I found lots of thinks I did not need with this program, like old movies hiding away, folders full of microsoft junk, etc. Don’t delete anything if you don’t know what it is though.

3. Clear out your Library/Application Support folder
Have a look in your Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder and there may be some old folders from applications you have deleted but no longer use. You can delete them.

4. Clear out your Printers
This is like the languages, but for printer drovers. OSX comes ready to work with hundreds of printers, chances are you only have one or two. Have a look in Macintosh HD/Library/Printers and delete any folders for printers you don’t need. For example the Epson library contains 1.4Gig of files – yet I don’t even have an Epson printer!

5. Manually delete files
The slow but hard way to make more space! But there is a trick to speed it up. To see how much space a folder takes, go to Menu ‘View/Show View options’ then select the box that says ‘calculate all sizes’. Then sort by folder size by clicking on the size heading in the window. You can now see which folders take the most space.

When you are finished deleting files empty the trash. This deletes them totally from your hard drive and frees up space. While they are in the trash they still take up space. Be careful, there’s no way to get them back after you have deleted the trash!

1. Run the program called PPD installer in the MACOSX folder.

2. Go to System Preferences, Printers & Fax, and click the little + button on the bottom left to add a printer.

3. Select IP Printer, LPD, then type in the IP address of your printer. Then select “Select Printer Software” as follows:

4. Select your printer form the list, click OK.

It works. In fact it’s simpler to setup than it was in Leopard which is nice. Thankyou Canon.

An external VGA Monitor which are the cheapest and most common external monitors you can buy, have a lead like this:

So to plug them in you need an apple display adapter that looks like this:

A note of warning. There are two different kind of display adapters, because there are two kinds of mac ports. Make sure you tell the apple guy when you order what model mac you have (eg macbook, imac etc) so that you get the right adapter. 

Plug it in, and your mac will automatically find it and you’ll have a second display!

1. Go to your utilities folder.
   (Click on your desktop anywhere so that the finder is active.
   Hold down apple-shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)
2. Open ‘Activity Monitor’
3. Press apple-1 so that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.
4. Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

 
There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have, the higher the better, and
Page outs tells you how many times your computer has had to slow down because it has run out of memory and needed to move some of it’s memory back to the hard disk temporarily to free up some space. (This would be the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up your headspace!) This really slows down your computer.

If the page out count is increasing as you watch it, this is not good, it means your computer has run out of free memory, and so temporarily is using the hard disk as memory. The faster the page out count is increasing, the worse the problem – your computer is struggling along and not performing as well as it could. You need more memory.

If you have had lots of free memory since the last time you restarted your machine, the Page outs count will be 0. This means your computer had enough memory and has not run out. You dont’ need more memory.

It may be that your Pagein/outs count is high, something like 50431/10850, but steady and this and not increasing. What this means is that some time in the past when you opened a lot of programs, you ran out of memory, but now you have enough. Reboot, check the Pagein/outs count again. It should be 0/0. If it is not 0/0, have a look at it while you open a program or two and see how fast it increases, the faster, the worse your system performance will be.

Here is a screen shot of my computer. My page in/out count is quite high – 66825/697, but I still have 189 MB free, and the page in/out count is not increasing at the moment. This means that sometime since the last reboot, my computer ran out of memory, but currently it is OK. If I reboot the page in/out count will return to 0/0, and stay there unless I go crazy opening lots of programs. I don’t’ need more memory.

To quote from apple:
Moving data from physical memory to disk is called paging out (or swapping out); moving data from disk to physical memory is called paging in (or swapping in)… Extended periods of paging activity reduce performance significantly; such activity is sometimes called disk thrashing.

One more note: Under Leopard rather than giving a ‘count’ of page in/outs, it gives a size in MB of the amount of RAM that has been pages in or out – the numbers are smaller but the same principals apply.

There is a design problem with some G4 ibooks. It can appear after a year or so in some machines. After being on for a few minutes, they get a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes. This article describes the problem and how to fix it.

What models are affected?

After doing this survey which involved over 300 faulty g4 ibooks it appears all models are susceptible to this problem.

The original 2003 ibook G4′s (800/933/1Ghz) have the fault. The “Early 2004″ (1Ghz) models up until Oct 2004 have the same motherboard.

The 60G (1.2Ghz) “Early 2004″ model and all the “Late 2004″ model ibooks (1.2Ghz/1.33Ghz) and Mid 2005 (1.33 and 1.42Ghz) have built in airport extreme which means a different motherboard but they still have the fault. Even models with the new motherboards are affected.

What is the fault?

The Danish Consumer Complaints Board did some investigations and confirmed the fault. There is a really good report in the form of a pdf document with close up pictures of the fault here:

www.forbrug.dk/fileadmin/Filer/PDF/ENGF959-orig.pdf

Here is a photo from the paper. You can see the thin black line below the lead which is a crack in the solder.

My ibook is indeed just as the article describes it. The little chip gets hot, and if I press my finger on the chip, it works! Take my finger off, it stops working!
I rang Apple Australia and they don’t acknowledge that the problem exists. They have officially ‘never heard of it’.

The repair:

You need to grab a fine tipped soldering iron and heat up the top few pins of the chip one by one to resolder it to the logic board. Press the chip down while you apply a very clean and fine soldering iron tip to each pin.

This is a very complicated ‘how to’ a bit outside the scope of this site but may be interesting to some. Don’t attempt this one unless you have had lots of soldering experience!
Here are some pictures:

The G4 ibook with the bottom case off. The offending chip is circled.

Here is a closeup of where I have soldered the legs of the chip. You can see the base of the top pins are shinier from the new soldering. I soldered the top 3 or 4 pins on each side, but it’s only the top 2 pins that the fault occurs with as they are the main power pins. I applied a little more solder to the joint as well, that’s why it looks a bit lumpy.

As pointed out in the discussions below, you might want to take out $10 worth of insurance by buying this little app. Then you can set the temperature that your fan turns on a little lower to keep the ibook cooler.

Here’s an alternate crude DIY repair method:

http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/

another DIY solution is here:

http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/?p=20

There’s some good discussion on the apple pages here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1369476

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5968305

In this article I described the fix for the G4 motherboard fault, but it seems from the comments that more models are affected than what I described there.

SYMPTOMS:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Still unsure? Read more about the symptoms here and here.

Here are the results of a survey regarding the affected models:

With so many different battery types, how do you know whether to recharge them or flatten them every time you use them, and does it matter?

It does matter. Some batteries can be damaged if you use them wrongly, others have a reduced life. Here’s a quick guide.

• Lithium Ion Batteries (Li-ion) are found in all new Apple laptops and ipods. They are also in digital cameras and mobile phones. The more you keep them charged the better. It’s best to never let them run out. They only last about 300 full discharges, so if you let them run totally flat you have used 1/300th of their life. It’s best to charge them as often as you can. Whenever you are not using them put them on the charger. Keep them cool while charging.
• NiCad batteries are exactly the opposite. It is best to let them run totally flat each time you use them. They are found in older cordless drills, older laptops and some cordless phones. If you recharge them before they are fully flat they will ‘remember’ where you discharged them to. So if you keep charging them when they are half empty, you’ll find they will stop working when they are half empty.
• NiMH batteries are like Nicad batteries but the ‘memory’ effect is not as bad. You should still discharge them fully but it won’t hurt them quite as much if you don’t. If you cant’ do it every time, try to fully flatten them occasionally.
• Car batteries (lead acid batteries – also in some camcorders) are the worst for being damaged when fully flat. Every time they go fully flat it does irreversible damage – 3 or 4 times and they will be totally wrecked. Like a lithium ion battery, it’s best to keep them as charged as fully you can.

When you have worked your way up the sites, and over the top, the lid will pretty much fall off like this.

These are the screws you need to tighten, there are 4, and the ones on the left are covered by a little piece of yellow sticky tape you need to remove and then replace after you are finished.

The tightening!

That’s it, now carefully put the sticky tape and lid back together, and replace the two screws. It should take about 1/2 hr to an hour.