The first step is receiving thousands of pre-owned Macintosh computers every month, mostly from corporate and academic environments. Hands of Support purchases Apple systems in large lots with quantity discounts. That's how we can offer such a huge selection at the lowest prices anywhere. Once we have these great bargains on the shelf in our warehouse, we get to work adding value for you.

Our primary concern at Hands of Support is to make sure you get a fully functioning Macintosh that gives you years of exceptional service. So the next thing we do is take apart every unit that comes in. Hands of Support technicians remove each component for individual inspection. The hard drive, optical drive and memory are all tested separately outside the computer. Then the motherboard is tested, and in the case of notebook computers, the keyboard, touch pad and screen.

Next the hard drive is reformatted, removing any trace of what the last owner had installed on the system. The process also verifies hard drive functionality and ensures the drive has no bad sectors. Then Apple OS X 10.4 Tiger and iLife are installed, so you have everything you need to use your Mac, including browser, desktop search, chat and video capabilities.

Apple iLife is a suite of applications, which includes all these powerful tools:

iPhoto for managing and enhancing your digital images	iMovie for creating digital films
iDVD for burning your DVDs and CDs	GarageBand to create your own musical compositions
iWeb for building your own website

Then we put it all together. Once all components are checked, the unit is reassembled and tested one final time. At this point, we can guarantee the Macintosh you buy is working flawlessly, and mark it Certified Pre-Owned for your protection.

Hands of Support's Macs are Certified Pre-Owned. We're here to help. Call or click now!

Hard Drive The hard drive is where all of your programs, documents, songs, images and videos are stored. Hard drive sizes are measured in gigabytes, so "250GB" means the hard drive has 250 gigabytes. One gigabyte of storage can hold about 10 music CDs. That's about 250 songs in MP3 format which can be played on your iPod. A DVD movie takes up a lot of hard drive space, anywhere from 5 to 10GB. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and iLife takes up about 11GB of Hard Drive Space.

Basically, the more hard drive space you have, the better. People hate to delete things they have collected, like favorite songs and family pictures. So you should get a bit more than you think you are going to really need. New Apple Macs come standard with up to 250GB hard drives. They keep getting bigger every year because people are always installing more programs and downloading more and more files. Plan ahead and get at least 160GB.

You should get even bigger than this if you are doing any image processing, video or music production with your Mac. In that case the 500GB is recommended. And remember: your Mac will come with Apple iLife, so you'll have the tools you need to make videos, do image processing and other tasks that use a lot of hard drive space.

Optical Drive

Optical drives play CDs and DVDs. Apple has two kinds of optical drives, the SuperDrive and the Combo drive. The Combo drive came first. It was a big advance over the CD drive, which played and recorded on CDs only.

The Combo drive also plays DVDs. You can watch DVD movies on your Mac with a Combo drive, but you cannot record on DVDs, only on CDs. Recording on DVDs requires the SuperDrive.

The SuperDrive does it all: play and record on CDs and DVDs. Writing on DVDs is a great benefit, because you can store up to 4.7GB of data on one single-sided DVD disc. This is about 8 times more than you can store on a single CD. This makes DVDs perfect for inexpensive backup of your entire hard drive, or at least your critical documents, songs and family pictures.

Memory

Selecting the right amount of memory for your needs is one of the most important decisions when you customize your pre-owned Mac. Memory is different from hard drive space, which is for permanent storage of your files and data. The Mac can't do anything with that data until it is actually transferred from the hard drive into memory. Hard drive data is sort of like information in a book. You can't think about it until you've read it into your own memory.

Computer memory is measured in megabytes and gigabytes. The best amount for you depends on the programs you plan to use, and how many programs you are going to run at the same time. Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger comes preinstalled on all pre-owned Macs from Hands of Support. The minimum requirements are 256MB of memory. However, this is the bare minimum. With only 256MB of memory what happens is that the operating system and the programs you run have to keep saving to the hard drive and swapping data back and forth between memory and the hard drive in order to run. This is like your Mac having a short term memory. It has to keep looking things up on the hard drive, and this really slows things down.

The same thing happens again if your programs or data files become bigger than what can be handled in memory at the same time. So the way to get the best performance is to get as much memory as you can. You should always get at least 512MB. If you are creating graphics and doing image processing, then you should get 1GB minimum. And if you are working with real time audio and video production, get the max your Mac can support.

Wireless Apple Card

You'll want to keep your Mac connected to the internet. The fastest, easiest way to do that is with Apple's Airport Extreme Card (or Airport Card for older Macs). The Airport Extreme Card is the standard for connecting wirelessly. More and more public places such as schools, office buildings and even coffee shops offer free Wi-Fi access to the internet. All you need is the Airport Card to take advantage of it. You can also exchange files with other nearby Macs that have Airport capability, play multi-player games or even do some serious work. And because the signal travels through walls, you don't even need to be in the same room.