I have recently bought a new Imac, just having a few problems setting it up with my printer and getting it working efficiently. I also have a Mac Powerbook laptop that's about 5 years old and I think it needs a new hard drive.

As a graphic designer I rely on my 2 machines so much, and could do with knowing of a specialist to help me out with a few bits and possible repairs.

If anyone can recommend someone who can come to my home (where I work) in Greenhill to sort it, I would appreciate it.

Many thanks!

Hi

While they cannot come to Greenhill - I find the main UK Mac Newsgroup a fantastic source of help -

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.comp.sys.mac/topics

I though Macs "just worked"?

i'd recommend andy at 10th Planet Design - www.10thpla.net

Do you have the hard drive? Is it the new Powerbook? I have just replaced the RAM on my new MacBook (upgrade) and I believe the HDD is fairly easy to install.

Do you have the hard drive? Is it the new Powerbook? I have just replaced the RAM on my new MacBook (upgrade) and I believe the HDD is fairly easy to install.

Nope - unfortunately the PowerBook isn't easy to work on. The MacBook is easy to swap drives on, but all other Mac laptops (including the MacBook Pro) are much more difficult.

ah ok.....when I changed RAM. I found a video on youtube and followed it through!

The laptop is struggling, I took it into the apple shop, they could fit a new hard drive, but they recommended I used someone else as it would be about half the price. My new Imac works, just won't seem to work with my printer, so something else I could do with sorting. I spend more time trying to get it working than I do actually working some days!!

What model printer is it? And is it total non-worky or just some of the features?

Regarding the hard drive - I've not fitted one to a titanium powerbook (which given the age you quote is what I guess you've got) but have fitted one to an oldish ibook and they're supposed to be the worst to work with. But with the help of a web guide (and taking care to note where each of the 18 or so screws came from) it wasn't *too* painful. Possibly more fiddly is the issue of transferring all your email, documents etc from the old drive to the new one as you'd need a way to mount both at once (have both available in the Finder) to perform the copy. One way of doing this is to put the second disk (temporarily) into an external usb drive case.

As an alternative to replacing the hard disk, have you considered adding an external hard disk? This would be faster / cheaper / larger than a laptop drive, just a little bit less portable.

I agree with InTheUk - get an external and save the hassle. I picked up a neat little external hard drive for £69.99 nearly a year back. It's slim, about 100mm x 50mm, light, it's 160gb capacity and is powered via USB - no need to plug into the mains. Very handy, no problem slipping it into your laptop case when you're moving around. If you look around you could probably get one with more capacity but at the same price, if not less, nowadays.

I had a few problems with a HP A3 printer I bought a couple of years back, I was under the impression that I could just plug-in and play but I eventually went on the HP website and downloaded some software for it from there.

Maybe you should try doing that - and if that doesn't work - maybe go back to the Apple Shop and see if they could help.

You should take it to a mac specialist store. I don't know if there are any in sheffield though...so that might be a problem. But many people open up shops to specialize in mac reparations or problems.

We have a mac specialist at VeryPC

http://www.very-pc.co.uk/verymac/

Just drop us a line and ask to speak to Adrian.

Hehe! Told ya! :thumbsup: