Mitch does voice-over work and still uses a 2004 Power Mac G5. But the fan is so loud. So he's looking to get a new Mac Pro. Leo says that although it has a big fan, it's extremely silent thanks to it's central core design. But if he doesn't really need a lot of horsepower, the Mac Mini is very quiet as well. An iMac would also work great. That's what Leo would be looking at. It would be about $1200-1500.
Peter just bought the new Mac Pro. Leo loves his. On his old Mac, he would be looking at videos off YouTube and would get a message that it requires a faster clock speed. Is the Mac Pro fast enough? Or will an i7 iMac be faster? Leo says the iMac isn't as fast and even if it was, he'd have to spend almost as much to get to that speed. The Mac Pro uses a Xeon Workstation processor with fast cores and data buses. So in almost all operations, it's fast enough.
Jim is having boot problems with his iMac running Snow Leopard. It's constantly telling him to restart. He can't boot from a startup disk. Leo says it sounds like a Kernel Panic. It means that the computer just can't go on. So that means that there's a serious issue with the hardware. Jim can try zapping the PRAM by rebooting and holding down CMD-OPT-P-R. Sometimes that'll solve it. But it's more likely a logic board problem or a power supply.
The spinning beach ball means the Mac is working on something. This could be a failure in the program, the operating system, or the hard drive. As computers get older, hard drives get harder to read, and the computer takes longer. Since James' iMac is quite old now, it may be time for a new one. This symptom is difficult to diagnose accurately.
Jeanette's son's computer was hacked and she's concerned that her Mac computers will be infected if he connects it to her network. Leo says that she should go into the security system preferences and turn on the computer firewall. That will protect her individual computers inside her network. What about her iPad? Leo says that she doesn't really have to worry about the tablet getting infected. Nobody is writing viruses that can infect an iPad from a Windows PC.
Joe just got a new iMac and wants to know what external hard drive would be best use as a back up, USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt? Leo says that Thunderbolt drives are few and very expensive. He doesn't really need that. USB 3 is more than fast enough and very affordable. And they're formatted to be read on Mac and PC.
Bob's 2006 iMac needed updating, so he installed OS 10.6 as a clean install, but the updated files didn't seem to install. Can he revert back and find his data? Leo says he could because it doesn't touch the data. Unless he erased the drive, and in that case he would need a file recovery utility.
Bob says he did copy the files over to an external hard drive first, but he says the newest date on the files is 2010. Leo says not to worry about the dates on the files. They could be creation dates not modification dates.
Andy has a 13 year old son, and it seems like every year he has to upgrade the computer for him. Should he just get a new computer, like an iMac that can run Windows virtually? Leo says that an iMac running Parallels is a great option, but Andy should keep the computer in a place where he can see what his son is doing. Boot Camp is a good option for running Windows natively on it.
Peter has a 27" iMac with two additional Apple Cinema displays. Sometimes he only wants to use one but they won't shut off because there's no on/off switch.
Fran wants to know if she should upgrade to OS X Mavericks if she buys a 21" iMac from Apple. Leo says it's odd that Apple is shipping their latest hardware without Mavericks. It should already be installed. If not, she can easily download and install it from Apple. It's a free upgrade. What about a fusion drive? Leo says it's not really worth the extra price. She should go with either a hard drive or, better yet, an SSD.
