Sundry Problems With New Macbook

[Robroy]

I bought a white MacBook 3 months ago (Intel CoreDuo, 2.4GHz, 2GB memory). It has a few problems. I have asked my Mac dealer here in Vientiane (Lada) about the below, but they don't know any answers. That's why I've come here.

No need to tackle the whole list - but kindly respond to any questions you happen to know answers to:

1. The touchpad isn’t nearly as sensitive as my old titanium MacBook. Half the time double tapping on it doesn’t open a file.

2. The computer turns itself off sometimes when I carry it home (has plenty of battery). Could this be because of the bumpy road I travel on on my bicycle? (I notice something called 'Sudden Motion Detector' is enabled, tho there's no info on how to disable it.)

3. The computer shuts itself down when the battery runs out. This sometimes happens after I have opened 20 or 30 webpages I want to look at that evening - which means I have to restart & thus lose those pages. (I have no Internet at home.) How can I get the MacBook going again (i.e. open it on the webpages I left there), after plugging it into power, without an actual restart?

4. The last 2 or 3 times I’ve brought my MacBook home in my backpack, when I took it out it was very hot & the fan was running fast. It did not wake from ‘sleep’ when I opened the lid. How can I prevent this?

(Note: my energy preferences are set to ‘Computer sleep: Never’ and ‘Display sleep: Never’ - because if not, the machine was in the habit of going into sleep mode whenever I shut the lid for more than a few minutes - & I couldn’t wake it again.)

5. The machine runs much slower than my old one. It can take 30 seconds to open a Pages doc; or a webpage. Any way I can speed it up?

6. The trackpad gets damp or sticky, then cursor gets stuck on one doc & drags it everywhere.

7. In terms of security & safety of the information, is there any difference between storing files on the Desktop & storing them in the Mac’s Documents folder?

8. I’m not that computer-literare, but am interested in the Firewall. However I can’t understand any of the websites on it I’ve read. (There is IMO a perennial problem of computer advice using specialist terms that laypeople don't know.) Is there a simple explanation of Firewall anywhere, where non-technical language is used?

Thanks!

[nikster]

Is that a used Mac? It seems to have a lot of problems... here is what it should do:

- It should sleep when you close the lid, and wake when you open it. If it doesn't wake - you need to fix this before attempting to fix any of the other power related issues as they're most likely related.

- if the battery runs out it should go into hibernate mode and preserve all your open web pages

- if you set sleep to never it will still sleep when you close the lid -there is no way to turn that off on a mac, at least not without hacking

- Fans running hot means the computer didn't sleep when you closed the lid= bad.

You can try an SMC reset - see here to do this for your model: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

Also, do a verify disk and repair permissions in Disk Utility. This ensures the HD is OK.

7 - No there's no difference

8 - You don't need a firewall as most likely you're connected to the internet via a router that already has a firewall. Also there are no viruses or malware in the wild that would require one. All the Mac malware is of the trojan horse kind where you have to download the software yourself, then enter your password to make it run. A firewall doesn't protect you from that. So leave the firewall off.

As for explanation: Outside servers can connect to your computer via internet; Each connection as a port assigned to it. A firewall intercepts all connections, checks the port they want to connect on, and only allows certain ports, e.g. web and email, and disallows all others. This way, hackers probing your computer for open ports can't get through. It's more a problem on Windows as Windows has a lot of ports open by default and some of them can be remotely exploited to hack your computer. On the Mac, there are no known exploits to do this.

[Jimi007]

It is recomended that you should not carry MacBooks in the sleep mode as they don't have a latch anymore and it can open and turn on, which it sounds like yours does. This can and will ruin your hard drive, especially riding a bike around with it on! Hard drives really don't like to be moved around or bumped when running. I too have an old Titanium and carried it around in sleep mode, but I don't carry around my MacBook Pro, unless it's off. You can save your web page as an archive for reading later. Also you can adjust your trackpad sensitivity in your system preferences. Click the Apple on the left of the screen, scroll down to it. You can clean your trackpad, keyboard and screen with a damp cloth (not too wet) and dry it with a dry cloth, then it won't be so sticky. Also there is the sleep mode near the bottom of the same menu, try that instead of just shutting the top. But it is still much better to shut down when traveling with it!

[Orion76]

5. The machine runs much slower than my old one. It can take 30 seconds to open a Pages doc; or a webpage. Any way I can speed it up?

Replacing your HDD with a SSD and upping the RAM to 4GB are both likely to speed things up significantly.

If an SSD is too expensive, but currently have 5400rpm HDD then consider upgrading to a 7200rpm HDD + upgrade the RAM.

A combination insufficient memory and a slow HDD will result in a slow system, no matter how fast the CPU.