Local "mac help" needed in Midlands, England (UK)

[6163621]

Hi there.. I am currently overseas and thus finding it very difficult to support my father's Mac (currently some odd problem with IChat not connecting to AIM despite the firewall allegedly being oK). I have tried to discount "father finger problem" (he does not run as administrator) but the problem is also replicated on a "clean" unused account.

Obviously some beer tokens or suchlike on offer for kind helper... it should not in theory take a lot of time but... He runs an Imac (800 mhz) with Dlink dsl504 router currently on 10.3.5.

Apologies if this is the wrong section of the forum to post this.. and if a kind moderator could move it that would be appreciated.

If anyone is up for this (evenings ?) could they email me on di at rexsson dot fi ?

Many thanks !

 

[TMA]

Hi there,

I'm in the Midlands, where abouts is your father based?

I've not had alot of experience getting iChat to work, it's always worked straight away for me. Just to eliminate it as a cause of the problem, have you tried running with the Firewall disabled ? (a pretty safe thing to do on a mac)

 

[6163621]

hi.. it is in Coventry.

The firewall/router are integrated and it is wise to have it plugged in since he might plug his PC back in one day and we all know what happens. I cannot see what has changed and certainly I had no problems with 10.3.5 or the other software updates. I have got him to run DiskUtility and repair permissions but it is very painful telling him things remotely by phone.

Thanks.

 

[TMA]

Hi there,

Sorry Coventry is a little far for me, I'm up in the North East of Leicestershire. From how you describe the problem it sounds like there's something being blocked or ports not being forwarded correctly at the router/firewall. That's why I thought it would be a good idea to just temporarily turn off the firewall/open everything up to test if that theory is right.

It really would help to locate weather the problem is port/router based or a problem with his Mac OS X install.

 

[Abstract]

Yeah, I agree. At least isolate the problem. It could just be a simple setting, although I've never used iChat.

And no, I'm not in Coventry, but I'd help if I could.