Bournemouth — Sep 17th 2013
Alan then opened the group meeting by thanking Christopher Harrison of Solutions, who is moving on to write for Future Publishing, for his support to the Bournemouth group over the years. Alan also asked for a volunteer to share the group reporting role since Roy Rainford is stepping down from this role and Trevor & Mary Hewson (the current scribes) will be unable to attend some of the Winter meetings.
The Q&A session was opened by Euan asking for a cheaper car parking option, now that the RIchmond Gardens car park was operating 24hr charging. Dean Park Road was recommended. Other questions covered the re-partitioning of external hard drives, which led to a useful exchange of views on how different members used Time Machine. Mark Ford had found an app, TimeMachineScheduler, which makes it easy to adjust the interval between Time Machine backups.
In response to Alan's appeal for topics for future presentations, Lightroom and the use of KeyChain were suggested.
The main presentation of the evening was by Euan Williams who detailed his experiences in cleaning a 2007 iMac and fitting a 2.5in Solid State Drive (SSD) in place of the original 3.5in hard drive. Whilst the task itself doesn't demand any special skills, Euan stressed that the key to success is in the research and preparation - and taking your time! In particular making sure that you know what machine you are dealing with will enable you to ensure that any parts you buy will fit (not the case with the parts supplied by this particular iMac's owner!).
iFixit was recommended as the place to find instructions for gaining entry to your machine and enabling you to judge whether the task is one you are prepared to tackle - later iMacs have become increasingly difficult for DIY servicing.
Accumulation of dust and dirt was an issue with the machine which Euan was working on. In removing this, care needs to be taken to avoid a build up of static electricity, so vigorous blowing or vacuum cleaning is not recommended. Euan used a small paint brush and Dean (of Solutions) said that a clean air spray can can safely be used in small bursts.Fast and sustained airflows tend to build dangerous static.
In re-assembling everything, electromagnetic shielding integrity and temperature sensing probes were mentioned as being easy to overlook - again the key to success being prior research.
In the subsequent discussion it was observed that swapping drives on a Mac Pro or on a MacBook was a much more straightforward operation than on the iMac. The Apple Fusion Drive, a combination of separate SSD and Hard Drive which will fit in an adaptor which replaces the optical drive, was also mentioned as an alternative upgrade path.
After thanking Euan for his talk, a further short Q&A ended with the question - is the iPhone 5s a non-event, or just setting the foundation for more exciting things to come?
Comments
Page 1
Page 1