My PowerBook came back from Apple on Friday (I had put it in the mail on Monday, so not bad), and I’ve been trying to make it mine again since opening the box on Saturday.
The machine came back fixed. One of the problems it had (has), was that the battery would go from full to empty in about 20 minutes. Apple doesn’t replace batteries, even with their extended warranty, though they agreed that the “battery no longer has the capacity to function at a level necessary for optimum operation of your unit.” Apparently, the fact that all batteries suck means that PowerBook/iBook users have to shell out $130.00 every 12 - 24 months. Which is what I did last night after the following experience.
I had to put my Mac down to tend to the toddler who had just woken up from his nap. Several hours later I returned to find the PB screen dark as expected. I hit return to wake it up, but there was no response. I hit shift. I clicked the mouse. Nothing. I pushed power, and it booted up. Hmmm, why did it power down instead of just going to sleep?
Here’s a clue: when the PB finally booted to the desktop, OS X informed me that my computer’s clock was set to 1969 and this might cause problems for certain applications—which it did. I reset the clock, rebooted, and now all is well.
Here’s my guess as to what happened. The PB got separated from wall power (it happens, the connection is loose courtesy of the aforementioned toddler who finds no end of excitement making the little light go on and off), then the battery ran down before the machine had a chance to go to sleep, the backup battery (which keeps the clock running and provides just enough juice to allow you to swap batteries while working) soldiered on for a minute longer before it too gave up the ghost. No electrons, no computer—and no power to drive the PRAM (the Mac equivalent of a PC’s CMOS). Lets hope this is it, anyway. I don’t want to have to replace the backup battery as well.
While I’ll never know exactly what the repair department did to bring my Mac back to life, one thing they did was replace the hard drive. Oddly enough, they didn’t put it back to a fresh-from-the-factory state, instead there was already a user named “a” created on the machine. That, and they installed OS X 10.3.4. I suppose it’s fair not to install Tiger, they don’t know I own it, but why not 10.3.9. Maybe ’cause it sucked.
To reclaim my Mac I first had to access my secured WiFi network. I couldn’t remember my password, and I had to look it up on my wife’s iBook. Then I installed Tiger on the PB using the “replace and install” option of the install media, and I installed Xcode too. Software Update informed me that I had a 130MB of updates to install as well, and then I had to download (forgot to back them up) and install all of the “little” apps I’ve paid for and can’t live without. To wit:
- LaunchBar. Spotlight before Spotlight was cool, and much more versatile.
- NewsFire. The “Angelina Jolie” of news readers. (hint: NewsFire keeps your subscription list in ~/Library/Preferences/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist)
- TextMate. A text editor for programmers.
- Skype. You know.
And some big apps too:
- Oxygen. A Java based XML editor with XML Schema and XQuery support.
- IntelliJ. An intuitive Java IDE. (I spent $500 dollars on this two years ago as Eclipse on the Mac sucked at the time, but now I never use it.)
- iLife.
- PhotoShop.
And even though I own a copy of MS Office, I elected this time to go without, and installed NeoOffice/J. I’ll let you know how this turns out. It seems to work, but it takes a full fifteen Mississippis to start up.
A note about mail.app. Maill.app may be ugly, but the junk mail filter is fantastic. I’ve barely trained it at all, and it’s flagging like 99% of the junk that comes my way. Someday, though, I’ll have to set up server side filtering on my mail server.
I copied my working files over from back up, my Safari bookmarks, and Keychain too. I had to reauthorize iTunes to play my ITMS music. I’ll have to call Apple soon and have them deauthorize the previous incarnation of this laptop. What else? I disabled Dashboard, removed everything from the Dock excpet Finder, set LaunchBar to start at login, paired-up my BlueTooth phone, restored my wall paper, ran through all the system prefs, and now my Mac is nearly mine again.
I’ll need to reinstall Ruby on Rails and ActiveLDAP for a project I’m working on. Someday I’ll have to recompile and re-install PostgreSQL, but I’m not using it right now. There were a handful of command line utilities I used Fink to install, but I can’t remember what they were. When I do, I’ll have to replace them too. Oh, and I have to set up the printer.
There’s probably more, but for now I’m home again.