New Mackbook Pro?
Not quite, but I did get apple to put a motherboard into my MBP. It was having some real problems with booting up and the screen flickering and after 3 visits to the “genius” bar they finally recognized that there was a problem. It was definitely hard to go without the computer for a week but it is now worth it. The computer feels more responsive (probably just b/c I have been using my old laptop), appears to boot fine, and more importantly works without issue on my external monitor.
Below is a video of what the video card would occasionally do when using any number of applications - it took me showing them that I had evidence that my laptop was broken stunting their standard “we can’t reproduce it” response to get any movement on the issue.
The part that is listed on the service details from apple is “605-1212 SVC,PCBA,MLB,2.4GHZ” - which after a quick search I realized it is indeed a new logic board.
Politics?
Uptime 40 days!
Its been 40 days since I have had to restart my macbook laptop. I use and abuse it - but it just keeps going. The last time my laptop rebooted was September 12th.
mac uptime
do you have a mac? are you curious?
macuptime.com
Macbook and Macbook Pro users Beware!
I wish I wasn’t writing this and rather reading it for advice before I spent countless hours swapping out hard drives and cloning data. Just about a month ago I purchased a white Macbook configured with a superdrive. I made the decision to skip the black version as I had plans to upgrade past the stock configuration on both the memory and the hard drive.
I promptly ordered 2 sticks of memory and the biggest drive I could find at the time (with any sort of reasonable price tag). I picked up the 5400rpm 120gb Western Digital Scorpio from Other World computing. As can be imagined once arrival I quickly imaged my stock drive to an external and popped the Scorpio in. In under an hour I was up and running with the drive and my up to date image.
This is where things stopped being easy. I noticed in the first day or two that I got a kernel panic - wrote it off as a weird coincidence and went about my work. Then it happened again, and again and again. I took out the new memory and replaced it with the stock memory - still getting kernal panics. I took out the Scorpio and the put the stock drive and shebam the kernal panics stopped. I gave a quick call to Other World and explained the problem and they insisted that these drives work well with the new intel macs. I had them swap the one that was sent with another Scorpio.
A week went by and I had another new drive on my hand. I repeated the install and clone and waited… I didn’t have to wait long, as soon as I put the computer down on the table it had a kernal panic. I started to associate the panics with movement. Then it hit me like 3 tons of bowling balls, the Scorpio has built-in shock protection. The ShockGuard technology that WD deploys is interfering with the macs own head parking technology. I once again called Other World and returned the second Scorpio in exchange for the slightly more expensive Seagate Momentus (which does not have built-in shock protection). After installing the Momentus and cloning over my now tired image, I haven’t had one kernal panic.
All that said, if you have a macbook or macbook pro, DO NOT upgrade to the WD Scorpio line of hard drives. I am sure they are great, just not great for mac users.
time to catch up!
Let’s do a quick recap and see what we’ve got.
Las Vegas: Just over a week ago I went on a company outing to Caesar’s Palace. For some reason I didn’t REALLY think about the how far Las Vegas is from NYC, but after about 4 hours on the plane I realized just how far it was… and still had an hour to go. The flight was something like 5 hours long, not to mention, in an ever cramped America West seat. Once in Vegas, I quickly took off my multiple layers needed in the 40 degree windy Manhattan streets in favor of a tshirt for the 90+ dry desert heat.
During check at Caesars I was fortunate enough to have my room upgraded to a jacuzzi suite. The suite was pretty money with two showers, a jacuzzi, a sony high def flat screen hanging on the wall, and a feather bed that I could sleep in for days. The sad part was I only had the room for 1 night, after which I moved my stuff into a normal room and bunked up with a few other guys to save on costs for the remainder of the weekend (Our company paid for the first night). The weekend was a lot of fun catching up with a few friends I hadn’t seen in some time, as well as losing money with friends I see all the time. We had a few all nighters in the casino and walked up and down the strip more than a few times. The flight back was fine, as I slept the entire flight… asleep before takeoff and awakened by touchdown.
Applestore: I don’t have a big update for this, but have been asked multiple times. Amy and I walked up to the new 5th ave store around 7pm opening day (opened at 6pm) and as we got closer we start to see groups of people standing around buildings. At first it I didn’t even think about them being there for the applestore as we were still 4 or 5 blocks away… but in fact they were in line for the grand opening. The line was so long it wrapped around multiple blocks, multiple times - before crossing the street to start again. I really couldn’t believe it!
Here are some links to the Applestore festivities.
360 degree out in front of the store
8 of the MacBook winners. I would like to call attention to Oleg and Ronald.
People swarm Steve at store.
going now!
It looks like it is starting to heat up!
getting ready
I can’t wait for this place to open… 24 hours a day?!?!!!!?? Might have to stop buy and pick up one of those new macbooks.
*grabbing for my wallet
I think this might push me over the edge. That mac mini is looking real good now.
Happy 30th Birthday, Apple!
I am waiting for my intel ibook, apple widescreen tv, next gen ipod video, apple cola, anything! But it doesn’t look like anything is coming out today… oh well.
should I?
I was lucky enought to get a little bonus at work for my performance review and was thinking maybe I want to buy something… maybe I want one of the newly annouced intel mac minis? I am almost sold by the the multimedia additions to this model, including frontrow… this thing is gonna be a hot little machine.
So I started to get my mind set on picking up one of those hot numbers but I was thinking that I don’t really have a monitor to use on it, and would have to pick one up. Maybe it would be smarter for me to pick up one of the new imacs? A bit more expensive but I get the computer and monitor all in one. I might just have to wait for some reviews to come out on the new mac mini, before I make up my mind.
call me a name
So, it was 12:48am eastern time. Jason and I sat at a coffee shop/bar type thing that has couches, beer, and free wifi during the day. I say during the day to setup my story. Jason and I decided to get out of my apartment and come to this coffee shop to click around and maybe grab a drink (me a beer and jason some weird fruit juice junk). We got here and the coffee shop turned trendy bar in a matter of hours. Whatever—we thought. Found a seat, sat down, powered up our laptops, and searched for internet. To our surprise we found none. Jason quickly got up and asked the worker what the story was… “Umm.... the internet is shut off here at 8pm” - jason comes back and gives me the story. I sat here and searched some more. All the while, jason has packed up his newly purchased ibook. All of a sudden a lightbulb BLEW UP in my head and I told jason to fire his daddy back up. “dude, what are you talking about - we don’t have any signal in this spot” - come on man, just fire her back up. So he did and I told him to connect to my powerbook. You see, what has happened is wireless geek magic. I remembered that I could connect to my treo 650 via bluetooth (wireless) and use the internet service that it has natively, I then shared out my bluetooth internet connection to my wireless internet card to jason’s laptop. So there we were, me pulling an internet connection from my phone in my coat pocket and re-broadcasting it to jason wirelessly who was sitting 2 feet away. The connection was slow, but we sure showed them when the damn internet shuts off in this place.
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