The dog days of summer are upon us and unlike the times of yore, they are for anything but lazing about, drinking ale and watching your crops grow…well for most of us. For those of you blessed with children it is now that we begin to think of everything that they will need to see them through another year of school. Clothes, books, scholarly utensils and of course the most fearsome of them all, the technological requirements. Which, by the way, are becoming steeper and steeper each and every year.
This week I am going to attempt to assist in the easing of some of the more stressful aspects of the student and their desktop or laptop.
Is your Mac under a year old but, over six months in age?
If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to purchase AppleCare. Of course, you have until the 12- month mark to do it but, with the chaos that ensues for most families that have children at school while working full time, it is an easy thing to forget until it’s too late. In my experience at the bench this simple thing has relieved many would be nightmares for students and families that are on tight budgets.
Is your Mac over a year old?
Now is the perfect time to consider a tune up at Mac Outpost. After a year most users begin to notice that their beloved laptop or desktop can slow down and not respond as fast as it once did. With the tune up we make sure that your machine and major software is completely updated, your caches refreshed (to increase response time), defragment your drive and also perform a full diagnostic on your unit. The diagnostic itself is a great value to give you that piece of mind that you have a healthy computer heading into another school year.
Do you have an automatic backup method in place?
I don’t want to sound like a broken record but, I still encounter students that do not back up their data AT ALL! This usually ends up being a serious problem for many fine students, reducing them to teary-eyed messes at the counter. Not only have they lost all of the work they have done up until that point (and it’s most often time sensitive) but, then the phone call to mom and dad happens to ask for assistance in paying for data recovery and in the case of being out of warranty, the hard drive as well. There are many methods to back up your data; my favorite being Time Machine combined with a portable external hard drive. For more information on backups please do not hesitate to give us a shout at the store.
Have you heard about Mac Outpost IT?
Finally, I do want to take a quick moment to recognize that you the student/parent have to deal with a lot of stress over the course of the school year. The last thing you should have to worry about is your computer.
For $12.99 a month we offer the Mac Outpost IT program which offers:
– Rush Service (normally a $110 when you have to bring your computer in for repair or assistance. Usually we are at a 5 to 7 business day turn around time during the school year due to our workload. Rush service can cut that turn around time to 2 to 3 business days.
– One free tune up for the year.
– Phone support for up to 15 minutes which can be assisted with a remote program such as LogMeIn.
We all wish you well in the upcoming school year! Please do not hesitate to contact is for any issues with your computer – if we don’t know the answer, we’ll help you find it!
-Paul Fletcher, Service Manager
