Qwerty I.T Services

New kit waiting to be delivered and set up at a customers home office

Setting up a new MacBook air for a customer as part of our “new device package” which includes helping the customer to find the right device for their requirements and budget, setting up and transferring data and applications from previous device.

An Apple iMac in this case, installing printers and other peripherals and finally the disposal of old devices including secure erasure of any hard drives containing personal data.

We don’t often see machines running Windows XP these days. However, they are still out there for various reasons.

This particular client were running a bespoke database package on a windows XP device due to software compatibility constraints. We were asked by the client to put in a more robust solution so that they could continue to run the database but without the need for a dedicated windows XP device.

We migrated the machine into a virtual environment which we could then run inside of a newer Windows 11 device. This saved on space, management costs and took away the worry of an old and unstable Windows XP machine failing.

Last week we had to do some network troubleshooting to decipher exactly how a complex home network had been configured.

After which we installed a new WiFi6 mesh system, as well as simplifying the network infrastructure to reduce possible failure points.

This iMac came in recently in a sorry state – the device was around 6 years old so it still had a few years of life in it, but unfortunately it had a “fusion drive” configuration at the time of purchase which was a great idea in theory (Combining a traditional “spinning disk” drive with a super-fast SSD drive) it never worked very well and once the price of SSDs came down it made much more sense to use a single SSD instead of a hybrid setup.

We were tasked with upgrading this device to use a single 480GB SSD drive whilst also reinstalling the iMac with the latest operating system (MacOS Sonoma). This one came with some challenges as the fusion drive was hidden underneath the motherboard so it required removing the screen from the case, removing the fan, removing the power board and the motherboard then installing the new drive before fitting everything back together and re-applying adhesive to the screen.

We loaded up MacOS Sonoma and after taking the iMac for a test drive we confirmed it was now lightning fast and had been given a new lease of life