I was going to write an article awhile ago about this not so well known application. It provided simple, selectable, and scheduled backups to your MobileMe iDisk. But with the upcoming iCloud, which sounds great and no longer a paid service, makes the MobileMe Backup version 3.2 obsolete. Maybe it’ll be updated so simple computer maintenance of additional backups can take place.
If you’re still interested in utilizing the MobileMe Backup you can grab it from Apple’s website here.
To begin with, not to happy about the download only OS X Lion upgrade. Now when I reinstall I have to download 3.5gb to upgrade to Lion. I can understand Apple protecting them from someone buying one DVD and installing on multiple systems, but there are better ways to go about that.
Anyway, if you’re experiencing an overheating Mac system it appears that the new OS requires a complete reindex of your system. This can take awhile to run and will consume a lot of your system resources. If you look at your Activity Monitor you’ll probably see mdworker using anywhere from 5 to 90% of the processor. My reindexing is still going on but my system temperature should drop once the indexing is done (my system temp reached 168 degrees).
So I had a client the other day whom thought she had a lot of viruses, and when I first glanced at the system I immediately noticed there was no antivirus software installed. Being a PC there’s really no reason not to have virus protection and recommend checking out Avast Home Free Antivirus Software.
So I installed Avast but didn’t run a scan at that time as I wanted to inspect what was going on with the system (a scan would have taken at least an hour). After looking through the running processes I found nothing out of the ordinary. So I ran a disk check, forget what it’s called exactly and I’m on a mac so can’t look it up, it took a little while but finished without errors.
I then scheduled the disk check with another option that could only be processed after reboot and also scheduled a full virus scan after reboot as well. Then I ran disk defragmenter, I figured since there were no viruses or lack of hard drive space that her drive must have been very fragmented. Not to my surprise, it was over 60% fragmented, so I let that run and left only charging the customer for an hour of work as that is all it took. I gave her instructions to let the defrag run, then to reboot the system when it finished to let the disk utility and antivirus run.
She contacted me a few days later stating how much better her system is running and thanked me very much. I provided a better service than the company she previously hired whom charged over 2.5x my fee for the same time worked, and she saw no improvements to her system after they left. Not only that but they obviously didn’t bother installing antivirus, defragmenting the hard drive, etc.
Yesterday I had a customer come to me with his laptop stating it was very slow, which indeed it was. His HP printer queue was hung and the spoolsv.exe process, which is the Printer Spooler, was consuming 100% of the CPU. Usually this is solved by doing the following:
In most cases this should resolve the issue. However, for him, it did not as the queue still had a print job waiting to be printed and after the service started back up the process was immediately back to 100% CPU usage. When this happens, follow the instructions below:
That should resolve the issue, and it did for him until I tried printing a test page. The print queue was hung once again so I went through the above once more then looked at the printer properties. Noticed it was setup to use LPT1 but the printer was actually connected via USB. So I changed that and everyone was fine and dandy!
Got a call from a potential client whose laptop was really slow. I went over to his workplace and immediately identified that the Print Spooler was the culprit consuming 100% of the processor. I was able to clear out the print queue but once I tried to print something it’d go back to 100%.
My next step was going to be reinstall the drivers for the printer, incase they had become corrupt. However, while I was looking at the properties for the printer I had noticed it was setup to use LPT1, after a quick look at the cable I knew I found the problem. It was a USB printer, so I changed the port from LPT1 to USB and he was good to go.
For more information on ways to clear out a hung print queue on Windows check out this blog entry.