There are a couple of simple preventive maintenance tasks that you can do to make sure your Mac always runs smoothly. I can show you how to do that and I can also teach you what you should watch out for that would spell trouble in the future.

Backing up your important data is crucial because sometimes accidents happen and hard drives can fail. I can show you how to be prepared and minimize the discomfort that data loss can cause you.

If you've got multiple Macs that you'd like to all have online I can help you get them all connected using either a wired ethernet router or using Apple's Airport Extreme or Airport Express.

Getting online safeguards set up correctly can prevent unauthorized access to your home network by hackers or even by neighbors who could use your wireless network without your knowledge.

As you use your Mac more extensively you may find that it would benefit from more RAM or more hard drive storage.

Increasing the amount of RAM in your computer can have a dramatic effect on its speed. If you don't have enough memory the operating system will have to move data from RAM to the swap file on your hard disk which causes everything to feel sluggish.

Many Macs allow you to have multiple hard drives mounted internally. You can also add external hard disks in Firewire enclosures. These can be extremely useful particularly if you need to move large amounts of data from computer to computer.

When you add a new peripheral like a printer or a scanner it's important to get them set up correctly Using the right cables and getting the latest software drivers installed makes everything function smoothly.

It's often the case that the installation CD you get with a device is already outdated when you purchase the product. I can show you how to download the latest software.

Mac OS X allows you to create different user accounts so that each person in your household can have their own user name and password.

This prevents one person from viewing, changing or deleting another user's files. This would also keep each user's email separate from the others.

There are a number of products available that will allow you to restrict the web access for your children. These can be set up on a user by user basis so you can have different levels of security for each family member.

There are also a number of monitoring features available. I can install monitoring software and show you how to use it.