Macintosh

My powerbook is fixed

by

I got my PowerBook back today. They had to replace the motherboard. Since it’s still under warrantee, there was no charge for the repair.

I notice that System Profiler no longer reports a serial number. Poking around with IORegistry Explorer shows that the serial number strings aren’t present. I didn’t deauthorize it for iTunes Music Store before I had it repaired, and now iTunes thinks it isn’t authorized. Thankfully I haven’t reached my limit for number of authorized machines, although I probably will with the Mac Mini.

PowerBook Repair

by

My powerbook is now in the shop to have its motherboard replaced. It will be at least a week before I get it back. Before I brought it in, I backed up the entire drive to a FireWire external drive. I’m now using my G4 Minitower with my user directory on the external drive as my home directory, so my working environment is exactly as it was on the PowerBook.

It's worse than it appears

by

My nearest Apple service center wasn’t able to work on my PowerBook before my trip next week, so I decided to try to fix the memory problem myself. Fortunately I found a screwdriver that will open the PowerBook at Radio Shack (in the Kronus Electronics Screwdriver Set, part #64-2967).

I was able to get it open easily, remove both DIMMs and reinstall them. After opening it twice and swapping the DIMMs, I see it still reports only 512M and System Profiler always says the lower slot is empty no matter which DIMM is in it. I also notice there’s no startup chime although sound works after I boot, which leads me to believe I have a problem with the motherboard.

I notice some strange messages in my system log:

Jan 11 15:48:42 localhost kernel: AppleRS232Serial: 0 0 AppleRS232Serial::start - returning false early, Connector or machine incorrect
Jan 11 15:48:44 localhost kernel: Sound assertion "0 == inputDataMuxOSNumber" failed in "AppleOnboardAudio/AppleOnboardAudio.cpp" at line 3309 goto Exit
Jan 11 15:48:47 localhost kernel: Sound assertion "0 == mLineInDetectIntProvider" failed in "AppleOnboardAudio/KeyLargoPlatform.cpp" at line 1252 goto Exit
Jan 11 15:48:47 localhost kernel: Sound assertion "1" failed in "AppleOnboardAudio/PlatformInterface.cpp" at line 143 goto handler
Jan 11 15:48:47 localhost kernel: Sound assertion "0 == inputDataMuxOSNumber" failed in "AppleOnboardAudio/AppleOnboardAudio.cpp" at line 3309 goto Exit

UPDATE: I ran the hardware test and the logic board passed, but it shows a memory error detected at startup. Looking at Apple’s discussion forums, there seems to be a common problem with the lower DIMM slot in 15″ PowerBooks going bad. It requires a logic board swap.

Half of my memory is gone

by

My PowerBook G4 suddenly froze, and when I restarted I found that I have only 512M of RAM now instead of 1G as I should. System Profiler says the lower DIMM slot is empty. One DIMM either became unseated or became bad. Unfortunately I don’t have the right tool to open it, so I’ll have to bring it to a dealer to have it fixed. Just one more thing in a frantic week.

Calm before the storm

by

Everything is deathly quiet in the Macintosh world the last few days in anticipation of MacWorld Expo next week. Very little new announcements are being posted and most of the big news is related to the Expo, Apple’s lawsuit against Think Secret, and various leaks. I won’t be going this year and Steve isn’t webcasting the keynote, so I probably won’t hear about the announcements until it’s over. Everyone expects Steve to shake up the Mac world with some big announcements.

Laser Printer

by

Yesterday I bought a Brother HL-1440 laser printer, which Office Depot is selling for $128 plus a $30 mail-in rebate. This is a great printer even at the original $150 price, but you can’t beat a laser printer for under $100.

It can print about 3,000 sheets with a $60 toner cartridge, which makes it a lot more economical than my Epson C82. It can’t do color and is less flexible than the Epson, but it’s much better for heavy daily use.

I connected it to my Linux box and shared it via CUPS so I can print to it from my Macs.

iTunes Sharing in Linux

by

I now have iTunes library sharing working in Linux, thanks to this article at O’Reilly network. Although the article refers to Ubuntu Linux, I was able to install mt-daapd and howl easily in Debian.

I back up my home directory on the PowerBook to the Linux box, so I pointed mt-daapd to the backup of my iTunes Music folder. The linux box shows up as another source in iTunes, and it even streams my protected AAC files from iTunes Music Store.

Macintosh to the rescue

by

The condo president needed a DVD documenting the tree root damage which broke a major pipe. She video taped the repair job, which I imported into iMovie via FireWire, exported to iDVD and burned the DVD in about an hour. I did it on my old “Sawtooth” G4, which I upgraded to a 1GHz CPU and added a SuperDrive. No one has a multimedia PC here that could do it.