Got my shiny new toy this week.

After months of headache with my old laptop, I’ve finally got a machine that works.

Technology’s a great thing and truly does make life easier if it works and you use it in the most effective way.

At times it can be a bit of an irritation when things don’t go as planned – as I discovered last week.

I was expecting a text to confirm a time and a place for a meeting with Andy who’s a client of mine, but it never came through.

This didn’t turn out to be a major problem as we made contact by phone and the meeting went ahead as planned.

But I was curious as to why Andy’s texts never appeared when I was getting other texts OK.

So as our meeting ended, I asked him if I could have a peek at his phone to carry out a few tests.

Turned out I didn’t need to do more than one test as I realised what was happening within seconds.

On an iPhone, when you send a text, it shows a green text bubble but my test message appeared in blue on Andy’s phone.

Blue meant that my mobile number was setup for iMessage somewhere.

iMessage is Apple’s built in messaging service that lets you send texts, pictures and video to anyone else using an iPhone, iPad, Apple computer or Watch.

I checked my iPhone and surely enough the iMessage function was disabled which is what I expected and knew that the root cause of the problem was that my iMac in the office must have this function switched on.

The very next day, I ran the iMessage app and lo and behold around thirty text messages came flying in dating back to 2015 including the one’s from Andy.

I’ve now disabled this function on the iMac which means all new texts will be received in standard text only.

So, if you have an iPhone and iPad or a Mac and want to enable or disable this feature, make sure you set all your devices to the same setting or you’ll experience the same as me last week.

On the iPhone or iPad, go to Settings / Messages to toggle this feature on and off.

And on a Mac, run the iMessage app and sign out of your account within the Preferences section if you don’t want to use this facility.