Apples

I bought a Macbook Pro from the Apple store last summer. It is just a laptop but there are a few differences. Firstly the price- about 3 times more than a standard laptop. A different operating system, compact and light, long battery life, fast, not so prone to collapse and viruses and nice to look at. It is made out of a solid piece of aluminium.

My learning curve was steep!

If you are thinking about getting one, you are investing in something that will still work fast in 10 years, which is a real positive. There are some great aspects, but I would heartily recommend that you took up the course of lessons offered by Apple to new users. This costs £79 for a year of one to one lessons. (This needs to be bought with the Macbook or Apple computer) Needless to say there is a catch! You can only book up to 2 weeks ahead, and only book one lesson at a time. The lessons are really popular, so it is sometimes hard to get a lesson when you want. The trainers are great in general, but vary!

One word of advice learned from experience is that whilst Apple have the reputation of not getting viruses or suffering from total failure, this is not correct! They need to be backed up just like any other computer. This is made easy by their software called Time Machine which comes as standard. All it requires is for an external hard drive to be plugged in and it does the rest for you. Apple is now one of the largest companies in the world and virus writers are now targeting them ( in the past there were so few users that it wasn't worthwhile!)

I can offer lessons using Apple products, Macbooks and Apple Mac as well as ipods and ipod touch, and iphones.

Printers, Photocopiers and scanners

I have noticed a rather surprising misconception amongst many folk...
Several clients have thought they were scanning things when they are actually only photocopying.
There seems to be quite a lot of confusion about this, so I thought it worthy of a mention on the blog.
Just to clarify things...

A photocopy is simply a paper copy of something you want to duplicate. This can be done in black and white or colour (if your printer has a colour ink cartridge!)
A photocopy doesn't need your computer to be turned on and your printer doesn't even need to be connected to the computer to do this.

Printing needs a computer connection and the computer must be turned on. The printer must also have been "introduced" to the computer so they know and recognise one another. Once this has been done you can print out emails, letters or other documents and pages from the internet as well as photos.

Scanning is really printing in reverse....You can copy photos and documents onto your computer by placing them on the glass plate of the printer/scanner face down and closing the lid.
It can be a good idea to scan in your important documents so that you have a computer copy of them should you ever lose them. You can also scan in old and precious photographs and store them on your computer.
You have to tell your computer where to save the scans and you need to give them a name too.