Tag Archives: Apple

HOW TO: Improve the performance of your older laptop!

HowTo, , , , , , ,
laptop

Just because your laptop is a few years old doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go and buy a new one, especially not if the hardware specification is fairly reasonable. If it can still run the latest operating system, for example, and you’re not interested in playing games on it, then read on.

The quickest and easiest way to give your laptop a speed boost is by upgrading the memory (RAM). In almost all laptops, manufacurers make it very simple for you to do this yourself in a matter of minutes, using only a screwdriver to remove an access panel.

The market leader in this (and we’re not affilliated) is Crucial. If you click onto their website you can run a tool which detects which laptop you have – be it Apple or Windows based – and tell you what memory you can fit. They tend to be the cheapest most of the time too. The tool will return results telling you how much additional memory your laptop can muster. If the version of Windows is 32 bit, upgrading your laptop to more than 4GB of memory will not make any difference as the computer won’t be able to “see” the additional memory.

The next step is looking at the hard disk. The cheapest laptops and even more expensive laptops by default still have spinning hard disks. Depending on the speed at which the disk spins at, will determine how fast the read and write speeds are.

Newer technology has since surpassed traditional spinning disk drives, and prices have come down massively. This technology is what you find in your mobile phone and tablet, and what enables most devices like that to be “instant on”, and is called Solid State Disk (SSD) as there are no moving parts. A lot of the time, this is why when you go back to your traditional laptop, you find yourself waiting much longer for things to load. It is a little bit more intrusive to replace and swap out your hard disk. You need to clone, or reinstall, your Operating System and copy the files back. There are guides for this, but we recommend you contact someone to look at this for you. The price of an SSD is somewhere in the region of £80-100 but prices are falling all the time.

Feel free to contact us if you would like assistance with replacing memory or your hard disk to give life to an older computer.

iPhone not charging? Check this quick fix.

HowTo, Mobile, , , , ,

The number of times your iPhone may not be charging due to it actually being faulty is fairly minimal, and more often than not, it’s the cable at fault and not the phone itself.

The iPhone 6 we have wasn’t charging and after checking the obvious we then hit Google. Some articles later, and we were lead to check if lint wasn’t to blame.

Sure enough, if you hit search you see the following results:

Lint Google Search

 

 

 

The essence of it is to make sure your iPhone is backed up, turn it off, and then use a normal toothpick to pick out any fluff and stuff that the Lightning port has attracted from your trouser pocket.  In our case this fixed the problem!

Better still, it cost nothing 🙂

For more info you can read the following: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-a-toothpick-to-clean-out-your-iphone/

How to accept hassle free Direct Debit and card payments

HowTo, Payments, , , , , , ,

For us, it is really frustrating to see businesses who are still operating but unable to take card payments or direct debit payments for recurring or subscription based products.

We are going to introduce a couple of solutions on this post.

We are not affiliated with either business and only writing this post to help other like minded small businesses and hope you find the information useful.

  1. Go Cardless. If your business offers regular and recurring invoices for services or products that are charged weekly, monthly, or annually then this service will probably be a good fit for you.

We use this service as it’s integrated with our accounting platform Quickfile.  You can set it up easily to receive payments from customers on your invoices. It gives us the opportunity to set up the payment via Direct Debit.

For more information and to see an overview click here

 

 

2.  SumUp. If you want to take card payments with no subscription or line rental, wherever you are (great for stationary stores or for mobile sellers, market stalls, pop up shops and more) then this solution is great.

Albeit, the majority of payments we take are still by cheque (or PayPal), we do have and use the app provided by SumUp occasionally. It ties in well with our accounting software, see above, and allows you to take card payments with no hassle whatsoever.

There are some restrictions, such as countries you can use the product, but for the UK, there is no problem at all.

When we first signed up, there was no requirement for the card reader, and I believe we still have the original product, so have to check if that still works… will update the blog when I have checked!

Ultimately, there is no reason at all, why any business has to limit itself by not accepting direct debit or card payments! Both the above provide mobile apps for Apple and Android and therefore catering for just about anyone.

Running Mavericks with Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac

IT, Software, , , , , , ,

osx_hero_2xI made it my aim this week to set up Mavericks, the new release of OS X, within a Parallels VM.

Firstly, I was trying to get it running without the newly announced client.

I had read the KBs on the Parallels web site which announced that you couldn’t install the new OS from a DMG directly but you had to have a VM with OS X 10.8 to then upgrade before going ahead (you can find that KB here).

Below are the steps I took.

1. Downloaded the NEW Parallels client designed to support Mavericks. This was version

Build 8.0.18494 / (Revision 886912; June 17, 2013).

Download Here.

2. Install OS X Mountain Lion. You can do this quite easily using the Parallels wizard (it uses the installer from the recovery partition). Make sure all updates are installed.

3. Download the Mavericks 10.9 Developer Preview and copy this to the Mountain Lion VM.

4. Very Important -> Move the Mavericks installer app to the ApplicaMavericks in Parallelstions folder on the Mountain Lion VM.

5. Run the Mavericks installer app from Applications in your Mountain Lion VM; run through the installer, selecting Macintosh HD as the disk to install to. It will begin the installation and will restart. This takes some time. It took me about an hour.

6. That should be it, your OS X VM should have now restarted and updated correctly to Mavericks.

Please do leave comments and I will try my best to help where possible.

 

Apple Software – Tiny Grab

IT, Software, , , , , , , ,

Tiny Grab
Tiny Grab

We landed upon this recently whilst looking for a piece of software that would conveniently allow us to take a screenshot and upload it online and enable us to share that link with others – instantly.

Enter Tiny Grab, developed by Company52, which allows you to do all the above seamlessly and effortlessly. What’s even better is the fact it doesn’t cost a penny which is something we really appreciate.

Some of the features include the following:

  • Automatic Image Uploading
  • Quick Image Sharing
  • Custom Server Uploading

Tiny Grab can be downloaded for Mac from http://tinygrab.com/download.php and for iPhone from the App Store