Macs Are Great!

I was among the many people affected by the late Steve Job’s reality distortion field on the day he introduced the original iPod nano. Fortunately I still had mine kicking around in a drawer this past weekend when I got an email from Apple, unsolicited, saying they thought they should give me a new iPod nano because mine has a battery that might do odd things like bursting into flames.

I found it, entered the serial number in a form and it was confirmed that my nano, ordered before the reality distortion field had worn off, was within the range of serial numbers affected by this recall.

Speaking of batteries bursting into flames, a federal agency used a Chevrolet Volt in a side crash test, and 3 weeks later the car burst into flames, a la battery fire. GM has responded that the instructions for handling their electric car include a procedure to discharge the high power battery after a collision like the deliberate crash test. If the feds had drained the battery pack as instructed the car would not have burst into flames.

Bursting into flames is arguably the worst possible failure mode for a battery. I respect the fact that Apple took the initiative in their case, and in the case of the Chevy Volt it highlights the importance of emergency response personnel knowing about the special handling for hybrids like the Volt or all-electric cars.

Battery packs bursting into flames will likely become a more serious problem as we are surrounded increasingly with more and larger battery systems.

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple, first-generation, iPod, nano, recall

will be releasing Snow Leopard on Friday and I have every intention of installing it ASAP. I intend to start with my main workhorse computer, my 8-core Mac Pro, on which I do all of my website development work. I ordered the 5-pack to include some of my other Macs too.

In preparation for the upgrade I’ve just started a complete backup of my 4 drive RAID 0+1 array using SuperDuper! so that I can boot back up immediately if it all goes horribly wrong. I still use Time Machine and SuperDuper! as a combined backup strategy. I have no intention of losing any of my over 2 million data files.

I’m not expecting trouble, but knowing I’m prepared no matter what happens reduces the stress involved with an OS upgrade.

Among my other computers are an original first Intel MacBook, still running Tiger, and a 15″ MacBook Pro. I think I’ll upgrade the MacBook to Leopard today so that it can be then upgraded to Snow Leopard.

I understand that the Snow Leopard upgrade set being offered on Friday requires Leopard be already installed. People not already running Leopard can buy a box set that contains a full version (not just an upgrade) of Snow Leopard along with the excellent iLife and iWork packages. $149.99 might seem like a lot of money until you compare it to what it would cost for another operating system and comparable applications, imagine buying an OEM copy of Vista with MS Office and some photo package from Adobe, it would almost certainly cost $500 to $1,000 depending on versions and any student discounts. And that would not include an analog of Garage Band either.

Price comparisons are moot anyway for my purposes, Apple produces the operating system and hardware I prefer to use, so I will continue to do so.
[tags]Snow Leopard, Apple, OS X, 10.6, release, Mac Pro, upgrade[/tags]

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: 10.6, Apple, Mac Pro, OS X, release, Snow Leopard, upgrade

Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 graphics card began making more and more noise until it became intolerable.

It had gotten so bad that the tiniest task given to the video card, such as switching between Spaces, would cause the fan to start whining even louder for 10 or 15 minutes.

We found references to this happening as a result of dust buildup on the poorly designed intake area of the video card fan, but on inspection found ours not so clogged at all. We do open our computers for cleaning every 6 months or so, as we live and work in an area subject to powerful sand storms (Macs Are Great comes to you from the Sonoran Desert).

So in an effort to resolve this issue we ordered the new NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT from Apple. Installing this new card was a breeze, and of course it was not necessary to install any drivers or dismiss 5 annoying dialog boxes about unsigned drivers. It just worked.

Once everything was all done, put back together, and working great I discovered another thread on Apple Support that suggested this noise might be caused by the air intake on the card being clogged by dust. Of course I knew that was not the case on my Mac Pro, as I had tried cleaning it to resolve the noise. Then I saw a photo one guy had taken of the dust clogging up his card, and I realized I had failed to see that spot when cleaning mine.

So just now I took the old card out of it’s static bag and examined it more closely.

Ooops! It was so thoroughly clogged with dust that you can’t see the heat sink at all. So maybe it is a perfectly good expensive 512MB video card. My bad. Maybe I’ll be more thorough in the future while cleaning inside my Mac Pro. I think I paid enough for the new card to learn a lesson from this experience

written by Steve Rider \\ tags: Apple, ATI X1900, cleaning Mac Pro, dust buildup, fan noise, Mac Pro, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, video card fan noise