stressfree - laptop

Apple battery recall

David — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 21:58:24 +0000

This news is a pain because it effects my PowerBook's battery. It is not the original battery that came with the computer but one I bought six months ago. Unfortunately due to the number of batteries recalled it looks like Apple's support website has gone down too.

apple
laptop

Return of my Powerbook

David — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:28:45 +0000

My Powerbook had to go in to the Apple Store for repairs on Wednesday. The initial estimate was in the order of a week to get a new logic board installed. I was very pleased when on Friday I received a phone call to say that it was ready to pick up. Two days turnaround is pretty good especially considering parts had to be couriered in (presumably from Auckland). I was thankful that I had purchased the three year AppleCare plan when I bought the laptop a year and a half ago else the repairs would have set me back a lot of money.

apple
laptop

Breakage Day

David — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 06:30:02 +0000

Its been a day for breakages today. Firstly last night my PowerBook began to slow down and when I did I system profile only half of its memory was registering. After testing the individual memory modules successfully I put the RAM back into the machine and everything came back up as normal. I was hoping the problem was solved but then this morning the laptop froze with what looked like a kernel panic.
After rebooting only half the memory was visible again which was a sign of definite motherboard problems. Fortunately I had invested in a 3-year AppleCare protection plan when I bought the machine so it was just a case of backing everything up and taking it down the road to the local Apple Centre.

Apparently its going to take two days before it will be even looked at and probably another two or three whilst they find out what the problem is. I already know what the problem is and the following link just confirms my suspicions. Hopefully they fix this issue up and don't try to sticky tape the thing back to me and run.
What complicates matters is my complex installation (dual boot OSX/Ubuntu) which I think in Wellington is pretty rare. The poor young technician looked slightly dazed when I explained the setup so I am hoping he does not try to pin the obvious hardware failure on software.

Then one of my clients mysteriously lost their web browsing abilities from behind a ClarkConnect gateway. After testing everything for ages at the server and on the different desktops I was out of ideas (except for the fact that perhaps the ISP had screwed up). A phone call to the ISP revealed they were having some weird issues and sure enough an hour or two later everything was back to normal. An email from the ISP would have been really nice but I guess its asking too much for the big telecommunications companies to admit when they are wrong.

So I am stuck using my dual G5 PowerMac for software development for the next week (poor me). Its a bit of a shock to the machine as its primary use at the moment is for my girlfriend's Sims 2 addiction. The real drag is setting all my development specific software (Eclipse, Tomcat, OpenLDAP, MySQL) on this computer as each of these takes tweaking and testing and after all the lost hours today that's the last thing I feel like doing.

UPDATE: I have just received a call from the local Apple support center to say they have ordered a new logic board for the PowerBook and hopefully by early next week it will have arrived and be installed ready for me to pick up. I am glad it did not take two days for the laptop to be looked at as the technician had initially told me.

apple
laptop

Ubuntu on PowerBook

David — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 05:08:18 +0000

I formatted my hard drive today and repartitioned it with space for OSX and Ubuntu. Originally I planned on putting in a larger hard disk but cracking open an aluminium PowerBook is like tackling a lobster with a butter knife.
Ubuntu installed effortlessly on the machine with very little input from myself. I was even surprised to find my Apple bluetooth mouse works without having to do anything. Apparently the wireless will not work but that is because the wireless manufacturer uses a closed source driver.

(Click to Enlarge)

iScroll2 - Useful Powerbook Utility

David — Thu, 05 May 2005 06:00:03 +0000

If you are the owner of an older Powerbook then iScroll is perfect for you. It provides the advanced trackpad functionality of new Powerbooks like two finger horizontal and verical scrolling and a few other tricks as well. The free utility can be downloaded from here:

iScroll2 Download Page