5 Golden Rules to Keep your Mac Healthy

August 15, 2011 at 9:57 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Macs are far more reliable than PC’s but aren’t immortal. Follow these rules to keep yours healthy:

1)   Check your hard drive regularly. This is the most important part of your Mac. Lose this and you lose everything. It’s also one of the easiest and cheapest parts to replace so there’s no excuse. Use disktools in applications/utilities. It comes with every Mac. Verify your hard drive every month and act on ANY error. Any change in the sound it makes needs investigating.

2)   Hard drives last about 3 years. Any problems and replace it while it’s still working. It will cost about £100 parts and labour and is far better done in a controlled way than in a panic in the middle of a big job.

3)   Check and repair disk permissions with disktools every month and after every System software update. It’s usual for errors to occur and they should be fixed.

4)   Watch out for strange activity, such as files not saving correctly and program crashes. Properly set up and sorted Macs do not crash EVER. Once again it’s better to sort out a small problem before it becomes critical.

5)   Back up. Please, please if you do nothing else do this NOW!

If in doubt please ASK! I don’t bite.

Tel: 07515354915

www.macrat.co.uk

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Welcome to the world of the nicest IT man in the country!

August 13, 2011 at 7:22 am · Filed under Introduction

This is my first post on my new blog so I am going to introduce myself and what I do….

Hi,

My name is Simon Ratcliffe and I am an Apple computer consultant with, I hope, more than one difference to your typical IT man.

I’ve been around Macs for years, setting up the systems to create the first UK national magazine produced on Mac in 1988. Prior to that I had been a programmer and System Analyst working on the IBM mainframe platform.

I set up my own company; MacRat Systems (named after the software of the time, MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite etc.) in 1991 and since then have supported Macs in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of individuals. I now work predominantly in Beds, Bucks and Herts and in London. I’m based in Beds and London.

I’ve got huge technical knowledge but try not to bamboozle people with geek speak. I hate the typical IT attitude of secrecy and techno babble. I’m quite prepared to teach people, so that they don’t need me as much, and I build systems and strategies for clients that are fault tolerant and don’t need my constant attention.

I work on my own, as I have never found anyone else who shares my customer focus and work ethic. I try to build long-term relationships with customers and do not take advantage when they need help in an emergency. All this from only £45 per hour on site!

Most of my customers have been with me for more than 10 years.

I’ve worked a lot for the rich and the famous and may tell some of the funny stories associated with these people (obviously I will respect confidentiality) in my blog, as well as commenting on all things Apple.

As I increasingly see distraught people who have lost a lot on a laptop I have launched Love Your Laptop™, which is simply a set of guidelines to help prevent disasters with laptops. Although I deal exclusively with Macs, the information applies just as well to PC’s.

You can see the information at my website www.macrat.co.uk

I am also a director of a company, which sells an online history of classic Jazz, with other music genres set to follow.

You can see this at www.jazzgreatsonline.com and take the free sample. Now available as an iPad app.

I’m quite happy to answer questions from Mac users any time either on 07515354915 or at simon@macrat.co.uk

Cheers.

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