I hope all of my Mac customers are enjoying this nice weather that we're experiencing.

In this month's newsletter I wanted to talk about our Mac Maintenance program. Believe it or not Mac's need maintenance, too. If you read this month's PC newsletter you'll read about two different maintenance programs that we our offering. One program is for our business clients and one is for our residential clients. We have the same two programs available to our Mac customers.

The purpose of these programs is to increase productivity and decrease down time. How many of us have had our computer go down and then we need to get something done and we're unable to do so. That scenario is always the same. Right after the computer goes down a frantic call is placed to your tech company asking how fast someone can get over there because you have something important to do.This is exactly what the maintenance program is for. We can usually see most problems coming before this happens. This dramatically decreases downtime.

For our business customers we have a brand new product that I'm proud to introduce called the 6 Point Maintenance Program. With this program we come in every month to assess and maintain your Macs, servers, and network. The six areas we focus on with this program are:

1.Tech Check-this is where we make a plan for your IT. This plan includes a report and a timeline to meet your current needs and goals.

2.Strategy-Next we sit down with you and develop a strategic plan so we always know where we're going

3.Backups-We make sure your backups are working. So many businesses we go to are going through the motions of making a backup, but they're never quite sure if it's working. When we come in we verify every week's backup.

4.Antivirus-We perform regular antivirus checks and clear up problems often before you even know you're systems have a problem.

5.Prevention-We complete preventative maintenance. We also leave a tracking form that allows you to write down problems as they happen so we will fix them when we're there.

6.Updates-We perform regular system updates. Most of us never run updates on computers or servers. These are often very important updates. We take care of these for you.

Our residential customers should have received a spring cleanup card in the mail. We are offering this program to all residential clients. We will come to you and perform maintenance on your computer. This generally takes an hour. We look at your backups, antivirus, we run an antivirus scan, and cleanup any other problems that you are experiencing.

To setup an appointment for the 6 Point Maintenance Program or the spring cleanup, please call our office at 815.494.6050

One other Mac-related item I wanted to share is new hardware from Apple. I would hold off on buying new Mac's until after the first two weeks in June. Apple is set to release new Macbook Pro laptops and maybe new iMac's. If you're thinking of getting a new Mac I would wait until after they release the new hardware. There are also rumors that the new computers will have high resolution retina displays.