Category: Geekery

That was relatively painless

I did the taxes today. It was a lot easier than I expected. Mostly because TurboTax did a good job of importing stuff from the previous year, and I took the tack that if I didn’t get a deduction for it last year, it’s probably not worth going through the form this year. Got a nice refund coming too.

Now that the most important time-sensitive use for this laptop is done, I can contemplate sending it in to get this heat-related Airport cut-out problem fixed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but the fix I got at the Apple Store last weekend was only a temporary fix and it’s happening still, mostly when it gets really hot.

And because I know you’re all breathlessly waiting for another update on this…

I went to the Apple store today and the guy opened the laptop and said that the Airport card was just a tiny bit out of its socket – which he didn’t believe was enough to cause a problem, but I figure that the fact that the problem mostly happened when the laptop was warmed up and moving, makes perfect sense. He also said he put some insulating tape over the card as well so it wouldn’t make contact with the frame.

It’s been several hours and it hasn’t happened since. Woo hoo!

It’s definitely the hardware!

I booted my laptop with the install DVD, started up the Airport, and fired up Network Utility. I used Network Utility to continuously ping my Linux box, and put it down. Then Vicki and I went out to dinner. When I came back, it was still happily pinging, but as soon as I picked it up it the Airport died. I guess that proves once and for all that it’s not Parallels or something else in my installation.

You know, it would be a real shame if it was so broken that they had to give me one of the new glass screen MBPs, wouldn’t it?

More fascinating facts about my Airport problems

It seems to happen more when I’m holding the laptop or moving it around, which would lead me to think that it could be flexing and dislodging something lose. It happened once today while I was at work and it was on my desk, but my home office is so cold I wouldn’t rule out thermal flexing. It failed tonight while I was standing there holding it in the Apple Store waiting for it to finish booting, it failed again while I was carrying it to the dinner table, and it failed just now when I picked up my computer from the floor.

It happened when I was logged on as Guest, which was something the Apple Store Genius suggested I try.

Whenever I reboot it because of this, Spotlight is busy indexing and can’t be used for a few minutes after it comes up. This is slightly annoying, because I use Spotlight more than the Dock to start up programs. But more than annoying, it’s worrisome because I don’t remember that happening before.

Tomorrow I’m going to try booting it from the install disk and seeing if it fails while it’s running off the DVD.

Sitting in the Apple Store…

I’m sitting at the Genius Bar waiting for the Genius to come back from the back room where he was probably googling my symptoms.

And now he’s back with some strange theories about a magic keyboard shortcut that disabled my Airport. And now he’s installing some third party software called OnyX. He keeps saying “well it’s still connected” and I keep reminding him that yesterday it failed three times in 5 hours (ie about once every 1.66 hours) and we’ve only been looking at it for half and hour, so that’s no indication of anything.

Oh well, next stop I’ll have to try something more drastic like ‘archive and reinstall’.

Update: After OnyX ran, the computer rebooted. I had to go to my chiropractor appointment, so I was walking out the store as it rebooted, and then while I was still in the store, the damn Airport turned off. I showed it to the Genius, and he said “Oh, that’s what you meant – oh, that’s definitely software”. I don’t understand why he didn’t understand what I meant at that point – when I described it the first time, the other guy behind the Genius Bar said “oh, you mean the pie wedge goes completely white”, and I confirmed that was exactly what I meant. I also don’t understand his conclusion. We’ll see.