Now that my computer business is basically up and running again (it was on hiatus for awhile, thanks to the economy), I figured I would offer a helpful hint to Mac owners.

First of all, owning a Mac, in the short-term, is expensive. Macs are expensive machines and when something goes wrong, they're even more expensive because of the ridiculous prices Apple Certified techs charge. Well, I'm Apple Certified, as well as Windows Certified (and Linux and Solaris), and don't normally charge ridiculous prices for easy fixes. But, the other day, I did charge a pretty outrageous price for an easy fix, but it wasn't my fault. You see, I had to charge $30 because that's my rate: $30 an hour. I get paid for the full hour, no matter how long I'm there (and that's cheap compared to other techs) - even if, like the other day, I'm there five minutes.

Problem: Mac stuck on restart; will not display desktop.

I knew the problem immediately. The person's iPod was still plugged in to the machine. For some reason, iPod's don't like to mount on a fresh boot. In order to mount an iPod, the iPod likes the computer to be on already, but the computer doesn't know that, so it keeps trying to mount the drive and the iPod says, "NO!" 

Fix: Unplug iPod and restart. 

In the long-run, Macs are cheaper than Windows machines, most of the time, because they are more efficient and quite dependable.