Mac Blues

Note: This blog entry comes from Jon; although Susan has had to suffer through this experience as well and offers a closing thought.

I'm coming to the end of what I seriously hope will be the worst 48 hours of my computer using life--at least for the forseeable future!

It was Thursday night at the RPG & DB2 Summit in Orlando and I was putting the finishing touches to a new Powerpoint presentation when the screen of my Mac started to "twinkle". Now it had been running a little slowly, particularly when running Windows software, for a couple of days, so I figured OK--time to shut down the virtual machine and reboot. Maybe even give the Mac a reboot to be sure. Never had the chance. The "twinkles" became a screen full of gibberish and the entire machine locked solid. Oh ... "bother" I thought (or words with similar sentiments, anyway) haven't had that happen before. Time for a full power off restart. But it didn't work. Instead, a little screen came up saying "Sorry - you need to try restarting again." So I did, and this time it worked. Sadly that isn't the end of the story.

I decided that taking an extra backup as soon as possible was in order, so I set up my portable backup disk and started it running. After it had run for about 20 minutes I figured it was safe to leave--since it was now after midnight and I was presenting at 8 a.m., sleep might be a good idea. However, the thought that I might be facing a major crisis somewhat disturbed my sleep. "Crisis"? Yes, I am on week two of a three+ week road trip and my master backup is back home!

So at 3 a.m. I was up again only to find to my dismay that the system had frozen again and I had an incomplete backup. I managed to reboot and to keep it alive long enough to save the files I needed for the next day onto a USB stick. Then I turned off the Mac and left it to cool down while I tried to get some more sleep. I think the (fragmented) "sleep" lasted for about 90 minutes before I was back up again. Wiser this time, I decided to copy only some of my most essential files. See how many I could save before it died again. I managed to get most of what I wanted and breathed as close to a sigh of relief as I was likely to manage.

Friday came and I delivered my presentations and headed for the Apple store, which thankfully was close by. The Genius bar (yes, it really is called that for those of you unfamiliar with Apple stores) confirmed my worst fears. Motherboard failure. Oh joy. Oh well, at least they could repair it. Yes - but ... sadly they were out of the boards for my model and it would take two days to get a new one. In other words it would be arriving in Orlando as I left!

I deferred a decision on what to do next until Saturday morning when I might actually be awake. Saturday came and I decided to copy the essential files to a temporary PC. Problem. Seems the backup disc was formatted for Mac and while the PC could see the device it could not see the file system. To cut a long story short, a second backup drive was located and with a combination of Paul Tuohy's laptop cooling fan, very cold Diet Coke cans and (at the suggestion of Skip Marchesani), a spell in the refridgerator for the Mac (yes, really!), we got the system to stay cool long enough to re-copy the essential files. As I type this, they are being loaded onto my temporary PC companion and I am praying that I have all I need for the next two weeks.

The Mac in the meantime is headed for the repair shop. With luck it will rejoin me in Reno at COMMON with its hard drive still intact. In retrospect I would have felt less nervous if I'd purchased a new MacBook and had the Genius' copy my hard drive, but that would have cost a lot of money.

Lessons learned?

a)You can never have too many backups (and yes Susan - I will try very hard in future never to make fun of your backups). 

b) No matter how reliabe something is, it will always go wrong at the worst moment

c) The Apple Genius bar is a wonderful thing

d) Even Macs are not infallible

More on this continuing (but hopefully not for too long) saga in the future.

Postscript from Susan: On a (much needed) lighter note, after delivering Jon's Mac for repair, we went shopping at a nearby Comp USA store (now owned by Tiger Direct). I figured it was a good time to convince Jon we needed more external storage for backups! After browsing for a while, we were told we had to evacuate the store due to a fire. There was definitely some smoke and I'm glad they decided to take the precautions they did. But it was amusing watching as the parking lot filled with fire trucks--ladders and pumpers--five in total--plus two EMT vans and three other fire department SUVs, not sure of their role in the excitement. The fire trucks were still arriving when we gave up on ever going back in and
left. We're pretty sure it was just an electrical motor that had burned out and that the cast of thousands of firefighters were not going to see much action there.

Undaunted by the experience, we headed to the Best Buy store down the road. After wandering around the store for a few minutes, a fire alarm went off there, too. This time, it was apparently a false alarm, which was turned off before any evacuation took place, but we decided it wasn't our day for electronics store shopping.

Comments

[Dan Devoe]

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed at it being the motherboard on the Mac -- I figured that there was a new version of Conficker out that Susan had somehow given your Windows VM... :-)

The "twinkling" reminds me of a flaw in the IBM T40 series, with the "flex" issue. For those of you not familiar with it, almost every IBM T40 that was made had a motherboard that would eventually fail. It wasn't the motherboard itself, but rather, the solder joints on the video card.

In making the T40 so "slim & light", IBM didn't reinforce the case, allowing the motherboard to "flex" when pressure was put on the case. This would cause the solder joints of the video card to eventually come just loose enough so when the T40 heated up, barely moving it would cause "twinkles" & "gibberish", and would usually require a reboot (which eventually would just give you a BSOD).

I have been successful in repairing several of these motherboards, but have also fried a few others.

(For those of you who are interested, here is a YouTube video on how to "reflow" the motherboard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR8L3B3eDr0

Jon, you should ask the Genius bar if this is a common problem, and exactly what caused it to happen. I'd be curious if it is the same issue that the T40 series of laptops had.

Best of luck! :-)