Apple

Jack wants to know if an SSD will make his MacBook Pro perform better. He's noticed that it takes longer to open websites. Leo says it absolutely will. SSDs are very fast and it's likely that Jack's regular hard drive is starting to fail. So now is the right time to make a change. The other thing to do is reset Safari, which will clear out the cache, cookies, and website history. He should also remove his extensions. That can slow things down as well.

Conrad has a Mac and he's having trouble with his hybrid hard drive. He's tried formatting and partitioning it using Disk Utility and he gets an "can't allocate memory" error. Leo says it sounds like a bad hybrid drive. The fact that it's a hybrid drive shouldn't matter because the hybrid part is handled internally by the drive circuitry. It should appear as a single drive to Mac OS X.

John got an old Macintosh SE and he keeps going through hard drives. Where can he find more of them? Leo says that the hard drives he's using are old and used and just plain worn out, since the Mac SE is 30 years old. eBay may be a good way to find those. Leo also recommends EveryMac.com, and LowEndMac.com. Since it has an external SCSI port, Leo says that John could use a more modern drive with a SCSI interface. Then he could daisy chain it.

Aurelia has a 2007 MacBook Pro and wants to know if OS X Mavericks would work on it. Leo says it's right on the edge and it depends. It may actually come down to RAM. 2GB of RAM is a bit light. Even if it will install, it may be slower, not faster, and it would be difficult to go backwards. Apple's recommendations call for 2008 or later. Leo recommends going with Lion, but no later. It's really time to start saving up for a new Mac.

Mary's son upgraded her Mac to OS X Mavericks and now it's running slower. Leo says Mavericks has bugs, but slowing down the computer isn't one of them. Leo says it could also just be coincidental, and that the hard drive is starting to fail.

Joe's iPhone 5 is having issues with Messages. When he erases messages, it doesn't free up any of the space on his phone. Apple says it's a known bug. Leo says there's a program called iBackupBot which will backup his phone, then delete the info and restore what's left to the phone. Or, he can backup his phone to the cloud, then toggle documents and data to off, and then restore.