Blue/Grey Screen

A common issue that arises with Mac’s is the scary blue or grey startup screen or just gets stuck on the apple logo and never loads. There are many reasons to why this issue could happen and troubleshooting is no easy task. If the following blog doesn’t help your issue our tech’s are located in Brisbane and help you efficiently with any Mac issue.  

One of the causes of grey or blue screen on startup is incompatible hardware that could be connected to the machine. Hardware that can cause this can include a printer, an external drive or a USB. Disconnect everything when booting your Mac so it’s working on the one thing. If it then starts the issue is with one of the connect hardware to figure out which one a trail and error would have to be preformed to figure the source of the issue. When you figure out the problematic hardware you will want to do a little research, head to the manufacturers website and see if it’s a common problem. If software update’s are available it is recommended because it could be the simple fix you need.  Maybe report it so they know that it’s causing an issue so they can fix it.

If the conclusion is that no device is causing problems and your Mac still wont boot then the next step would be to try a safe boot. This boots up your Mac with the minimum amount of drivers needed to make it work. To achieve a safe boot you must hold down the shift key until the Apple logo passes when the computer start up. If your Mac starts up with the safe boot then go and restart you Mac and see if it continues and boots up normally.

If you find this also doesn’t work you will need to check you run disk utility. To do this you need to boot up your computer while holding down the command and R. This will boot you into a diagnostic mode. Select the disk utility option and you hard drive. Click on the verify option and then wait for the disk utility to finish running if problems pop up click repair disk. If nothing pops up click repair permissions and wait for the disk utility to scan your hard drive again. If the disk utility finds and repairs the issues go and restart you Mac. In a lot of cases the disk utility will catch the problems with the startup issues. Sometimes a single file with the wrong permissions can cause the whole system to collapse or if something not in the right places it won’t boot your Mac.

If these simple fixes don’t help your Mac then contact us and we can come service your Mac. 

IMAP Gmail Help

When users migrated from MS Exchange to Google Apps Gmail there were numerous problems where shared access with the same mailbox occurred. This is a simultaneous connection error. This is used for when users need to set up the account on a number of different Macs so that each user could respond to customer support queries from a central mailbox.

The error that started to appear for users was too many simultaneous connections this message was sent from the Gmail server. Google implemented only 10 connections to any imap mailbox, which cause this problem. As part of the migration from exchange, we also took the opportunity to migrate away from MS Outlook and install the Mozilla Thunderbird, which includes the lightning plugin for the calendar functionality. Parts of the Thunderbird settings allow you to specify the number of cached IMAP connections to use on a mailbox, the default being five. Changing this to one forced all users to stick to a single connection to the shared mailbox.

To do this you right click account, then select account settings and advanced. Then select IMAP and you will be at the option of the maximum number of server connections to cache setting. This should limit each user allowing up to ten different users to connect to the same IMAP mailbox.

If you find you are still having trouble with this issue our technicians are located in Brisbane and travel to you. They help with Apple support and service for personal or business.