Water Damage

Our kids have computers and they don't always handle them gently, and I patch them up as best I can.  I will get to Bobby's latest problem with his MacBook but first I must explain the water damage and how we dealt with that.  He spilled Propel (a soft drink, not much sugar thank goodness) on his MacBook keyboard and it stopped working.

I let the laptop just sit for a few weeks, not plugged in.  The liquid will mostly evaporate if one has patience.  Then I put it in the oven on the lowest setting "Warm" which looks to be about 150 degrees (F) for 10 minutes.  I took it out of the oven and let it cool for an hour.  The heat helps get out the last of the moisture.  Then I plugged it in and let it charge.  After it charged it booted up just fine and has been running for a couple of months now.

I can't say that this approach will always work, but it costs nothing and has saved several of our devices from the recycler.

Stuck program on iOS

Let's say you've got an app on your iPhone or iPad that is "stuck" i.e. it just stays at one screen and no input affects it.  The best thing to do is to kill the running app and restart it.

Here's how:  double click the Home button.  This pops up at the bottom of the screen the icons of running apps.  Your bad boy is probably the first one.  Press and hold your app's icon until it starts wiggling. A red circle with a minus sign in it will appear at the top left of the wiggling icons.  Touch the red circle on your problem app, which stops it running.  Now press the home key once to return everything to normal.  Restart your app again by pressing its icon as usual and all should be well.

Making Windows 7 file share visible to OS/X Lion

I've got a home network with 3 PCs and 3 Macs and 1 Linux computer attached, plus printers and other bits.  For the longest time, I couldn't get OS/X Lion 10.7 computers to connect to a public share on a Windows 7 box.  All the obvious steps lead to "connection failure" on the Mac.  The PCs could see each other fine and access the files.

The fix turned out to be that I needed to turn on WINS on the Windows box.  Apparently WINS is kind of like DNS for NetBIOS.  Yikes, NetBios!  Who knew it still mattered?

The key page that did it for me is Configuring WINS Settings in Windows XP/Vista/7 which is from Virginia Tech.  Do this and then on your Mac Finder either Go Network or Connect to Server and Bob's your uncle.