Some Sage Advice

Some Mail users are experiencing problems, after upgrading the operating system to Leopard, where Mail will hang, the Mail interface appears blank, or not respond to input. One way to fix is to delete the mail .plist preferences file. This file is located in your Home folder under Library and Preferences. Hopefully you have all of your mail account settings written done just in case you lose them.

Also, if you have Leopard and a second hard drive for Time Machine (you should have a second Time Machine drive if you are on Leopard–that’s the whole point!), run an immediate backup just before you start messing with your Mail preferences just in case. Go up to the Time Machine icon in the right-side of the menu bar and choose “Backup Now.” When it finishes, you may proceed! I don’t want anyone to lose all your emails!

Sage Advice has been chosen to participate in the Citrix Beta test for their latest remote support option, GoToAssist. With this product Sage technicians can offer remote support and can control both Macs and PCs from anywhere in the world. This will allow us to more accurately and quickly diagnose and fix problems and get you up and running fast! Call us for a demo and we are sure you’ll be impressed.

We have done some initial testing and it has performed flawlessly. We were able to fix several problems remotely in a matter of minutes. Very impressive!

Representatives from Extensis have tackled this problem, and with the help of affected users have narrowed it down to a bug with long computer names. It seems that any Bonjour networking name that is longer than 32 characters or has complex characters in it will prevent Extensis Suitcase from working.

The following workaround should allow the software to work again.

Simply shorten the computer name In the “Sharing” system preferences, change the computer name to a short and basic name and do not use any strange characters other than letter and numbers. By default, the system will name it something like “Chris Smith’s Power Macintosh G5″, and give it a bonjour name of “Chris-Smiths-Power-Macintosh-G5.local”. Instead of these names, it might be best to give the computer a name “BooHoo2000″ or otherwise remove punctuation (dashes are ok), and shorten the length to 20 characters or less as per Extensis’ recommendation. While this problem has been reported to be with the Bonjour name, it is recommended that both the computer and Bonjour names be set to the same.