UK Mac Wizards

Mac Keyboard key stopped working

A client’s Mac had a keyboard with an ’s’ key that had stopped working. But we knew it wasn’t the keyboard itself because we tried another one and the same key didn’t work. The client’s password contained the missing key, and it worked on the login screen. Also, ’s’ didn’t work ‘S’ did.

Look in the system preferences. There are a couple of settings that may cause this strange behaviour. The obvious place to look is the keyboard preferences. 
See if the missing key has somehow been assigned to a shortcut.

Keyboard & Mouse pref pane

Another preference pane is the Speech pane, and this is the one where our missing key was found. The client in this case had at some point thought it would be nice to boss the Mac around and had left the pane with the letter ’s’ where the Esc key is indicated in this screen grab.

Speech pref pane

Other panes that can adopt keys for shortcuts include Spotlight, International, and Universal Access.

I hope this helps someone get the use of their keyboard back.

Hotspot or Notspot Map

To test your broadband speed please go to my speed testing page and record your results.

I’ve put up this page after coming across so many clients in the Oxfordshire/Berkshire areas with rubbish broadband speed. In particular, one client who has been with BT Business Broadband was getting a maximum of 0.5 Mb, while paying for 10 Mb for 3 years (paying quite a whack).

Other clients running PCs with anti-virus software find their computers slow down to a crawl as they download the latest anti-virus updates “in the background” at Windows start-up. Admittedly these are slow PCs by many standards, but a slow broadband connection neither helps such machines to perform any better, or encourages their owners to splash-out on anything better.

After you have tested your speed please record the result in the comments section of the page. If the result is really disappointing consider going to thinkbroadband’s broadband-notspot registration page as they campaign for better broadband.

Red=NotSpots
Blue=SlowSpots
Plain=good or no data

Contacts could not be synced

Helpful error message

Nasty error message that Apple deals with here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1998

Except that it seems to assume that there are 2 computers being synced and one of them is the more up-to-date. The problem I met with a client was that he had 2000+ contacts that showed up nicely on his iPhone, but none at all on his only Mac.

His iPhone was synced directly from MobileMe, but resetting his Mac’s contacts from the MobileMe copy had produced this error instead of rebuilding his contacts. I was concerned that any fiddling I did might wipe away his contacts on MobileMe with the automatic result that they are deleted from his iPhone too.

Fortunately, though it isn’t mentioned in the knowledge base article, it is possible to export contacts direct from MobileMe webmail to .vcf files. I say, “files” rather than “file” because in the case of over 2000 contacts it was better to break down the list into a few hundred with each export. Just select the contacts and use the cog icon.

After importing them back into Address Book the resetting of MobileMe can continue as per the knowledgebase article.