Aftermac's Personal Computer Cache

I finally had a reason to get back to the "Classic II #2" project that I started working on about 2.5 years ago. When last we left this malfunctioning Mac, I had finished washing the motherboard to see if that would serve as a temporary fix for the leaking caps. Unfortunately, the office remodel put everything I was doing on hold. Well, the good news is that it did work. After reinstalling the board, the computer booted up flawlessly. However, I was brought back to this project through a trade proposal for this Classic II and an Apple 3.5 External 800k floppy drive in exchange for a Power Mac G3 All-in-One (AIO). Normally, I wouldn't be interested in something that recent, or your average run-of-the-mill Power Mac. The AIO is different. It is both rare and unique, and something I just couldn't pass up. So, as of last week, I no longer own Classic II #2, which was a model variation on my Classic II #1. #2 is the original Classic II sans speaker grille on the left s

Jim Tanous at "The Mac Observer" ( www.macobserver.com ) wrote an article this week featuring my home office in his new weekly column "TMO Workspaces". Here is a link to the article: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tmo_workspaces_jason/ The Mac Observer is a well-respected news site in the Macintosh community that I have been following for over a decade, and it was an honor having them run a feature on my home office. Thanks, Jim!

For years now, I've done business solely by word of mouth, relying on clients to refer me to other potential clients, and so on. This practice probably nets me $1000-$2000 per year in computer repair work. I've long had grandiose plans for an elaborate website, but never have the time to put it together. It's long overdue to have some sort of a web presence, so I've thrown together a very simplistic page that I can slowly expand as time allows. http://www.aftermac.net Now that I've made this step, who knows what's next... A Facebook page? Gasp!!

Currently, I'm working on a laptop for one of my clients and thought I would share a few of the FREE hard drive utilities that I used to get the computer back in working order. First, after a CHKDSK scan revealed and successfully relocated 3000-some-odd bad clusters, I informed my client that the HD would need to be replaced. At this point I decided that cloning the HD to a new drive would be a reasonable course of action. A new 500 GB HD would replace the old 250 GB drive. Here are few utilities that I used to accomplish this: Clonezilla (  http://clonezilla.org/  ), is a Norton Ghost-esque, Debian Linux-based drive cloning live CD. Clonezilla offers several different methods for cloning drives, but for my needs I opted to download and burn the latest stable CD-ROM bootable .iso image to CD. I attached the new HD to the laptop using a SATA-to-USB adapter cable, booted from the Clonezilla CD, and performed a direct local disk to local disk image. The imaging worked perfectly, h

It has been five months since the passing of Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was a bit distracted when Mr. Jobs passed and I wasn't able to give the proper respect that someone would expect to give to the passing of one of their idols. For as long as I live, I will never be able to forget the date Steve died. The next day my wife gave birth to our first children, twin boys, on 10/6/2011. March 2012 marks 15 years since I first learned that Apple acquired NeXT and Steve Jobs would be returning to the company. It's hard to believe that much time has gone by, but I remember it very well. Back in 1997, although I had only been using Mac's for about four years (and only owned one for two years) I was very staunch in my belief that the Mac was the superior platform, and could never see myself as a Windows user. I was a senior in high school at the time, and had carefully woven my way into a position where I was doing all of the technical support for m

It's been two years since my last post. Not too long after I started this blog, I decided to remodel my office... and my basement has been a disaster ever since. Fortunately, the construction is nearing an end, so I hope to be able to post on a more regular basis. All of the old shelving was ripped out, new flooring was added, the walls and ceiling were painted, new track lighting was installed, a network rack is being installed, and new shelving is being constructed - including an additional 12 feet of desk space. I'm definitely looking forward to completing this project and being able to enjoy my collection again... Before: After: