Scrumpymacs.co.uk is an online site dedicated to selling secondhand and refurbished Apple hardware in the UK. The offer a range of Macs, displays and accessories at pretty reasonable prices. As an example at the time of writing they have a G5 PowerMac with 1Gb RAM and 80Gb HD for £165. If you are looking for an older Mac and would prefer not to risk eBay then it might be worth checking out their store to see if they have what you want.

In an expceptionally shrewd move Apple today launched a raft of new kit only 2 days before Microsofts release of Windows 7 including new iMacs, a new entry level Macbook, a new multi-touch wireless mouse and redesigned Mac Mini’s including one with Snow Leopard server !

Of most interest to the majority of people will be the Magic Mouse and the astounding new 27″ LED iMac. The Magic Mouse extends Apples multi-touch technology to the mouse, disposing of the roller ball for scrolling in favour of a mouse surface that is a multi-touch trackpad able to respond to most of the gestures possible on the MacBooks trackpad. Mac haters will no doubt love the fact that the device still sports no obvious buttons and will no doubt gloat over the apparent inability of the mouse to allow right mouse clicks, everyone else will quietly configure it to work exactly how they wish and revel in the usual Apple design beauty. Of course even amongst Mac fans the mouse has traditionally been something you either love or hate but personally I think this latest revision looks stunning and sets off the look of the iMac to perfection.

The new iMacs take the Apple desktop range to new heights and push the Power Mac further into a niche corner by delivering superb 21.5″ and a huge 27″ LED backlit screens, Core 2 Duo and Quad processors including the option of Intel i7 and the option to install a huge 16Gb of RAM. Apart from the internal specs the design of the iMac is largely unchanged from previous models apart from minor tweaks including a slight thinning of the aluminium stand, though you could clearly argue that the current design is still very much of the moment and therefore Apple have rightly not felt it necessary to mess with it.

The Mac Mini has received a performance hike with two new models sporting beefier processors and expanded memory and at the same time a DVD-less model complete with Snow Leopard Server has been launched, clearly an attempt to tempt smaller companies away from Windows server solutions. Finally a slightly slimmer and lighter white Macbook now receives a unibody casing ( ala MacBook Pro line ), LED backlight, a glass multi-touch trackpad and a 7 hour battery life wrapping off an impressive list of upgrades.

There is no doubt that the timing of these updates was planned to detract some media attention away from this weeks launch of Windows 7, though even the most fervent Mac supporter will have to admit that this week will inevitably be remembered for Microsoft’s new product launch ( though time will tell which is ultimately the most successful ! )

Apple has recently added a further two Get A Mac ads that poke fun at Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter campaign ads. The first “Top of the Line” introduces a female character looking for a new laptop who is introduced by PC to “Top Of The Line PC” ( played by Seinfeld actor Patrick Warburton ).

The second “Surprise” has PC posing as Mac and advising another prospective PC buyer to get a PC. When the lady leaves PC strips his disguise just as real Mac enters stage left.

Not the greatest ads of the campaign it has to be said and it is becoming clear that despite their outstanding success these ads are becoming a little stale. Time for a new Campaign ?

Its been a little while since I last saw a scare story about the “first REAL” virus for Mac OS X being in the wild, and this led me to wonder what anti-virus product UKMac.net readers typically used on their Macs ?

Personally I have free access to Sophos Anti-virus through licence at work, though I have to admit that currently I don’t have Sophos or any other product installed.

Let me know what you think ? Are Mac users in danger of becoming complacent, or is there really no real threat to our security ?

Heres a quick and simple tip that I can fully recommend. Don’t buy alcohol/chemical based screen cleaning wipes that claim to be designed for laptop or TFT screens. If your screen gets marked from finger prints or splashes from coughs/sneezes I only ever recommend using a clean micro-fibre cloth. You can buy these at any supermarket in the house hold section for less than a couple of pounds and they will last a long time if you keep them clean.

You can use dry for removing settled dust particles but if you have got any other sorts of marks on the screen you will need to VERY lightly dampen with clean water ( a few drops will do, the cloth should not get wet ). Gently buff the area with the damp part of the cloth being careful not to press too hard ( newer iMac owners with glass screens don’t have to worry so much about pressure but I do still recommend the same approach otherwise ).

Once you have cleaned the area change to a dry part of the cloth and light buff again. Any streaks caused by the water will clean entirely and you will be left with a screen that looks as good as new !

Apple Grrl has a great YouTube clip of some friends explaining why one of them should switch from Windows to a Mac. Well worth a look

Apple have yet again updated the ever popular iMac. Todays announcement introduces a new high end model sporting a 3.06Ghz Core 2 Duo, upgraded graphics in the form of an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS and 512MB of dedicated video memory and hard disc capacities of up to 1Tb.

This will further consolidate the iMac as THE premium desktop all in one computer and will undoubtedly continue the rise in iMac sales and further blur the previous distinction between the middle range iMac and the high end Power Mac. For the vast majority of users the iMac now represents both the mid range and the high end product in a very slick and desirable package.

For some a MacBook is all they need to stand out from the crowd, but if you would like your beloved Apple to stand out that little bit more you should head over to MacStyles.com. Here you can buy custom vinyl stick on covers that make an ordinary MacBook look something special. There are 21 different colours and a huge number of designs to choose from.

In addition to Apple laptops they have covers for iPods and Mac Minis. Well worth a look if you want to breathe a bit of new life into an older Apple product.

I have just had a quick count and I think in the last 12 months I directly affected 6 of my friends and family to turn their back on Windows and Get A Mac.

How many switchers did you make last year ?

Apples .Mac service is an excellently put together package of services that compliments the iLife suite of software and OS X perfectly, however, there are some people for whom the additional cost of .Mac cannot be easily justified. With Leopards new Time Machine providing instant and invisible backups of all your local documents the .Mac iDisk facility is perhaps less necessary than in the past, although an offsite copy of important documents is always worth investing time in if your information has any value at all.

As far as photo publishing is concerned the new Gallery feature of .Mac coupled with iPhoto 08 is a solid and seamless way of publishing your photos but it does have one possible downside, particularly to those with large photo libraries, capacity. A standard .Mac subscription buys you just 10Gb of storage. This sounds a lot but once you start uploading photos and videos this space will be used up fairly quickly. One free service that doesn’t get that much publicity which provides free photo storage and integrates nicely with iPhoto is Zooomr. Zooomr is more akin to Flickr than .Mac gallery in terms of facilities provided as photos uploaded to the service become part of a huge repository which others can search through to find images by name or tags. As with Flickr you can elect to change the visibility of uploaded images to prevent anonymous users from finding them by marking them as Friends or Family only. Unlike Flickr however the uploading process for iPhoto users is much slicker. Once you select to upload images and click on the Browse button you are presented with a Finder window that includes your iPhoto library and events which you can then browse through visually to locate the images you wish to upload. If you select an Event all the images in that event are immediately queued for upload. Zooomr has a number of other nice features including the ability to highlight friends and family in a photo by placing a movable marquee over them. Once positioned you can then enter their Zooomr account or name and email address and they will receive an email notifying them that they have been tagged in a photo along with a link to take them to it to view.

New to .Mac since the release of Leopard is the Back To My Mac service. This allows you to connect to any Mac from any other Mac across the Internet and remote control it as if you were sat right in front of it. This is undoubtedly a useful service for a growing number of people, however the Apple solution is hampered by the fact that it is Apple only. You cannot remote control your Mac from a Windows PC or a Windows PC from your Mac for that matter. It is also known to be fussy about router configurations and many users have had difficulty making it work reliably.

The alternative to Back To My Mac that many including myself have discovered is LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a web service that allows remote control of any PC from any other PC including Windows and Mac machines, all that is required is a small utility is installed on any machines you wish to control. Once this is installed you are able to login to your profile on LogMeIn.com and instantly connect to that machine from anywhere on the Internet. LogMeIn have a range of services including options aimed at corporate users for supporting remote users, but the Free option works fine and does everything most people would need of a service such as this. From my point of view I now routinely install this on friends and families machines so when the inevitable 10pm phone call comes asking for help on how to do X or how do I fix Y I have the service ready to go and can quickly take over and sort out the problem.

Sync is another .Mac service that is readily available freely in the form of Plaxo. In the early days Plaxo was limited to synchronising Address Books but with recent upgrades Mac users can now use the service to not only Sync their iCal appointments to other Macs but also to Google Calendar, Outlook, Yahoo and a host of other services.

As you can see there are a range of alternatives to the solutions offered by .Mac. This isn’t to say that .Mac is not a good service and many would argue that the tightness of the integration with OS X and iLife is so good that it warrants the expense of an annual subscription. If you cannot justify the costs though, please do take a look at these alternatives you may find just what you need.