Did you know that your Mac may have come with a pre-installed diagnostic test? Back in the days, you had to boot from the Apple Hardware Test disc that came with your Mac. For the past year or two, Apple has pre-installed these tests so you can run them without a disc.
Wondering if your Mac has a diagnostic test built-in? You could always just try booting up your machine while holding the “D” key, but if you’re having other hardware/software issues, this may not be successful even if the test is built in. Well, I just stumbled upon another way to check if your Mac came with a pre-installed hardware test:
1) Show invisible files in Finder (Onyx can do this but I prefer the free little app Invisibles).
2) In Finder, navigate to “Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices”
3) If you see a hidden folder called “.diagnostic” (I think that’s the name, it’s “.diag[something]) then you have a built in test. If you don’t see “.diagXXXX” then you’ll have to boot from the Apple Hardware Test disc that came with your computer.
Next time I get a Mac with a built-in AHT I’ll re-post the exact name of the folder to look for.
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Here’s a quick tip for other Mac repair technicians: use a 50 gram scale calibration weight to hold down keyboard buttons (like option, or shift). They fit perfectly on all Mac keyboards and only cost $5 with shipping.
You can find one of these weights on Amazon.com.
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Made this a few months ago for a desktop background and figured some other Mac fans may like it. I was inspired to make it when I had to fix a broken PC – something I haven’t had to do for years since I started doing only Mac repair.
Right-click here to download full size background image (1280×800).
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Several times a day on my Plex Mini I was opening the same two Finder windows (the “new downloads” folder and the “tv shows” folder) to make sure stuff in “new downloads” was being automatically transferred (using Episode Linker) to my “tv shows” folder.
Well, instead of manually opening the two Finder windows, resizing the windows, and navigating to the correct folders, I made an Applescript (with help from various other applescript sites/posts around the web) that does it automatically… Read more…
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I remember having a similar problem when Leopard came out… trying to print a label from usps.com would look like it’s working but the print dialog box would never appear.
There soon came a workaround, clicking the bottom left corner of the screen (a hidden button, basically) would allow the label to be opened in Preview.
With 10.6, this no longer seems to work. And, I couldn’t find any workaround using Safari or Firefox, it seems neither work correctly (probably because of usps’s javascript).
The solution is to use the web browser Opera. I’ve never needed or used Opera before because Safari or Firefox worked for every website. But now with 10.6, I’ll be keeping Opera around in case a situation like this happens again.
You can download the latest version of Opera 10 here.
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