Mac, diagnose thyself!

Posted on July 23, 2012 by ericgharrison

Over the past few years, our household has turned from a Microsoft Windows centric one, to one that is populated almost entirely by Apple Mac’s, along with iPhones, iPads and Apple TVs.

While over the years, the Macs have proved resilient reliable machines, our experience has not been without problems.

The only one that has been big enough to matter is the one that has affected my personal iMac.  It’s a 27″ monster, with 16 gig of ram, and a 500 gig SSD (not factory standard!).  This machine is super fast with its quad i7 processor and the SSD.  Unfortunately, over the past three months or so it has become unstable.  The symptoms started with random kernel panic’s (think Windows BSOD), and then moved forward to include drive corruption and the machine just failing to wake up.

Troubleshooting a problem like this can be a real bear!  I started with checking the SSD for errors, and it found quite a few.  After repairing those, things stabilized for a while, but then it resumed having problems.  I then thought that it was perhaps an issue with Parallels (which I use to run Windows and various Linux distributions).  I uninstalled and reinstalled Parallels many times, including doing the full uninstall process as documented here.

At this point, I began to run into corruption problems on the drive so bad that it was corrupted beyond a simple repair, and I had to restore the whole system (back up your systems kids!).  Fortunately this was easy to do because of the Time Capsule that we use to back up our desktops and laptops.

I then decided, since most issues seemed to be drive related, to upgrade the firmware on the SSD.  After downloading a bootable image and “burning” it onto a USB stick, I upgraded and the problem was solved!

For a few days. <sigh>

Continuing along the path of thinking that it was a Parallels problem, I downloaded VMWare Fusion.  I tried to migrate the Parallels VMs over to it, but it failed again.  This reinforced the idea that perhaps the problem was with Parallels.

I finally decided to “start over”.  I wiped out the machine, reformatted the drive, and did a clean install of OS X Lion.  Fortunately this was pretty straightforward and only took about 30 minutes, including the time to download it over the Internet.  I started installing applications (leaving out Parallels) and everything remained stable.  Hooray!

Until I installed the FitBit application.  Within minutes, the machine Panic’d again!  Okay, so clearly the FitBit application is the culprit!  I uninstalled it, and four hours later, the machine went down again.

I decided to try to find a way to stress test the SSD to force an error to come up so I could get a replacement.  After some searching around, I discovered the Mac’s have “built in” diagnostics.  The newest ones have it in eprom (or something similar) and you can get to them simply by pressing and holding D (for Diagnostics – those clever Apple people!) at the chime.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t on mine, so I had to figure out how to get into it from a Snow Leopard boot CD (these are what originally shipped with my iMac).  After several false tries, I figured out that it was on disc 2.  So to get the diagnostics to work, I just put in disc 2, rebooted, held down the D key and voilà, a few minutes later I was looking at diagnostics.

Now, let me tell you, these things look like they are from 1985… and I don’t care!  They are obviously written to diagnose a computer, not to have a super looking experience.  Here’s where things get interesting. I don’t have a wired mouse, and it turns out that the wireless one doesn’t work (I had a wired keyboard plugged in at the time, so I can’t say if a wireless would have worked or not – I’m guessing not), so I had to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the app.  It only took a moment to figure out tab and up and down arrow were my friends.  I tried to check the “thorough” diagnostics flag, but couldn’t make it work, so I figured I would just run the normal ones.  I kicked them off and sat on the couch for a few minutes and… BAM!  An error came up!  Oh happy day!  I can prove that my SSD has a problem and get it replaced!

Wait, hang on a second, this error says “MEM” in it?!

So get this, after spending months thinking my SSD was unreliable, the problems were coming from one of the memory chips!  Son of a…

To make an already way too long story somewhat short, I then had to uncable the iMac, pull out some memory chips, hook it back up (just assume this part happens a lot), run diagnostics again, find no errors, swap the memory chips (using the same slots to make sure I was testing the chips, and not another set of slots and chips), run diagnostics and it repeated the error – consistency!  It is my friend!  Finally, I pull one of the chips out, ran diagnostics, got a clean bill of health, put that chip aside, reinstalled the other ones, ran diagnostics, clean bill of health and…

Five days later it hasn’t had a glitch.  OH HAPPY DAY!

Posted from my now healthy iMac.

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Why did it take it take Apple so long to create white iPhones?

Posted on March 12, 2012 by ericgharrison

I bet they worked pretty hard at making sure it doesn’t do this as it ages…

 

 

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If my systems failed this much, I’d be out of work…

Posted on January 16, 2012 by ericgharrison

It seems that every time I try to do something on the MSDN volume licensing site, I get a failure message.  If my users failed this often at their jobs due to the systems not working properly, I’d be looking for a job.  Come on Microsoft, this is what you do!  You must make this work well…

MS Site Failing Again

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Some thoughts on the Kindle Fire

Posted on December 3, 2011 by ericgharrison

I’ve had the Kindle Fire for over a week now and so far it’s been an interesting experience.

There have been plenty of reviews that do a much better job than I’m willing to do reviewing all of the gory details (take a look at ArsTechnica’s review for a complete run down), but I do have a couple of specific thoughts I’d like to share.

To put this in perspective, my “other” tablet is an iPad 2. I totally get that the Kindle Fire is NOT an iPad, and is not a full fledged tablet, so these comments do take that into account.

First of all, the build quality is definitely a step below what you get with an Apple device. The design is “chunky”, and in my case, if you squeeze the top and bottom of the left side together (such as when gripping it between your finger and thumb), I feel the case flex, and I can even sometimes hear a tiny squeak!

Second, the lack of a built in Exchange email client is a tough pill to swallow. I’ve found an app that handles the job (Touchdown for Android – $20 for a license, 30 day free trial), however it does not work as smoothly as my iPad does. The main issue here is that even though the new email notification chime will go off when a new email arrives, the time it takes to display the email once the device is turned on and the app is opened can sometimes seem like forever. It’s probably “only” a 30 second delay, but that’s compared to no apparent delay at all with the iPad.

Third, the Kindle reading app itself. There is no excuse for something as simple and important as page turning to stutter. Now the good news is that a release that came out between the time I started writing this and now seems to have fixed this. The problem is that it still fails in another major way – reading magazines. I have gone pretty much paperless in my reading life and magazines are one of the things I’m happy to have on my device instead of on a table. The problem isn’t so much that the Kindle Fire screen is too small for reading magazines (most have a button on the screen that lets you switch to a text view that works just fine), it’s just that for many magazines, it completely forgets where you were at the last time you opened that magazine. It’s as if each time you put a magazine down, you don’t bother to put a bookmark in so you can find your spot! Now if you’re reading some fluffy magazine this might not be a big problem, but for things like Technology Review from MIT it is not acceptable to have to keep hunting for where you were last. The funny thing is, the Kindle reader app on the iPad handles this just fine.

Finally, the carousel that shows your most recent apps run / web sites visited / books read is just awful. It is impossible to position correctly, and it’s impossible to hide stuff. For example, if I just finished a book, on the iPad I can just delete it from the Kindle app. On the Kindle Fire, it’s impossible to get rid of it. I’ve read it, I’m done, I don’t want to see it again!

I’m finding overall that the experienced is mixed. What are your thoughts?

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New tools = new frustration

Posted on November 6, 2011 by ericgharrison

My post from yesterday was inadvertently configured with no commenting allowed. I’ve fixed the setting in the posting tool I’m using, and fixed the post itself. Sorry about that!

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Lapin Systems and Amazon delivering great customer service

Posted on November 5, 2011 by ericgharrison

Good customer service is such a pleasure when I encounter it. I had two stand out instances this week.

I have an iMac at home, and really appreciate Mac OS X and all that it brings to the table, but after having an SSD in my systems at the office for the past several years, I couldn’t take the “slow” hard drive any more. Just to be fair, the drive is no slower than that in any other PC (speaking generally of course). It’s a bog standard 7200 rpm drive, which is probably adequate for most people.

However, once you go SSD, you really don’t ever want to go back! I finally decided that I’d had enough of the performance “problems” on the iMac and put my plan in action.

The first thing I had to do was acquire an SSD. While we’ve purchased around 20 OCZ Vertex drives at the office, we’d had a high enough failure rate with them that I wasn’t going to buy another one. I ended up ordering a 512 gig Crucial SSD from Amazon on Monday evening at around 7pm, with standard Prime second day shipping. The web site estimated a delivery date of Thursday (not sure why there was a projected delay, but what the heck).

I was shocked Tuesday morning when I arrived at my office at 11am (I had to visit another office in a suburb before getting to our headquarters) and discovered that the SSD had already arrived! That is customer service!

The next part of the master plan was to get the drive installed. I’m a pretty geeky guy and could do it myself, but I also capable of changing the oil in my car and yet I choose to pay someone else to do it. I honestly just didn’t want to deal with removing the glass from the front of the iMac. Breaking or scratching that, or even worse leaving dust behind the glass (the horror) would cost a lot more than paying someone else to do it.

With just a bit of Google-Fu (Bing-Fu just doesn’t sound right) I found Lapin Systems in Evanston, IL. I exchanged some emails with them to confirm their willingness to do the work, and how long it would take. I was a bit disappointed that they couldn’t guarantee a same day turn around. It is understandable though – if someone came in with a “system down” situation, it would make sense to fix them up first. Anyway, I dropped the iMac off their office on Thursday at 9am with the promise that they be able to get it done today (not much work sitting on the bench I guess).

An hour and a half later I got a call from them that my machine was ready! Hot diggity. After a quick round trip to their offices I got the machine hooked back up and restoring data (back up your systems kids!).

A big thank you to Lapin Systems and Amazon for making this upgrade project pretty much painless (except for paying for the SSD).

Oh yeah, the iMac screams and runs multiple VM’s under Parallels (Windows 7 and Windows 8 ) quite nicely now.

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Delayed comment approval

Posted on August 30, 2011 by ericgharrison

I’m still getting used to WordPress.  I’ll be faster at approving comments in the future.  Sorry!

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Ditching cable TV

Posted on August 10, 2011 by ericgharrison

After our cable bill increased due to losing all discounts, Deb and I considered just how much we watch “live” TV these days.  The answer was “not much”.  We’ve decided to ditch cable TV.  This morning I made the call and terminated all TV services from Comcast.  A few hours later all of the set top boxes were returned to the local Comcast branch.

It will be interesting to see how things end up going.  Honestly the biggest concern is Monday Night Football, since we don’t have ESPN anymore.  We can pick up local channels using an antenna (hooray for HD quality!), and those will cover all the other games we care about.

As for other TV watching?  Well, there’s Netflix.  Given that we use their streaming more than we were watching normal TV, I don’t think we’re going to miss much.  This change will save us about $1400 per year!  All of our TV’s have Netflix built into them, or have an Apple TV attached, so there’s no extra cost there.  We do need to purchase antennas for three of the TV’s, (total of about $75), and a media PC or two, so even worst case, we’ll break even in year one.

In a day or two expect a post about our new Media Center PC in the living room…

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Dear The Planet

Posted on May 21, 2010 by ericgharrison

Dear “The Planet” – You Suck

The Planet does IT hosting. In my case, a friend and I share a server that we’ve had there for three years.  Unfortunately, I missed several emails from them telling me that my credit card had been rejected due to an expiration date passing.

Normally in a case like this, from a company providing a critical service, I would expect a phone call to clear things up and prevent a service interruption.  No phone call attempt was made.

So yesterday I get a call from my friend and he asks about our server not responding.  I assume the server is locked up and I tell him I’ll jump into the account and request a forced reboot – something that’s been necessary once before (not bad – once in 3 years!).  When I attempted to log in, I was told that my account had been disabled!

At that point, I tried to chat with a support person.  After 20 minutes of huge long delays in trying to get responses (send message, wait 5 minutes, get a “hang on, I’m working on multiple chats”, etc) I have to give up and focus on the meeting that I’m in.  Later that day, I try the chat again.  I’m told that my account was disabled due to non-payment of the bill.  More on that in a minute.  At this point I ask her to help me out with getting it reactivated and she says I have to *call* to speak to someone to give them the cc info as they don’t ask for it via chat.  <sigh>

That evening, I’m finally at home, where I can make the call.  I call and I’m told… “I can’t process it, you need to log into your account to fix it”!  After some back and forth, she activates my login so that I can go in and fix the billing info.  I try.  FIVE TIMES.  Each time it blows up with an error.  She’s still on the phone with me and rather than just taking the cc info, she says I need to submit a trouble ticket about not being able to update by cc info!  I submit the ticket and go to bed.

In the morning I check and I have a response that says in essence “please call, we can’t fix this without having you on the phone”.  I then go ahead and try to update the information and it works! Happy days!  At that point, I update the ticket and ask them to reprocess the charge and get our damn server online.  An hour later, ta-da, we have our server back.

Great, about 18 hours of downtime for a $69 credit card charge.  Yeah, I messed up by not watching my hotmail account like a hawk, so I take the blame for that, no problem.  But I have to ask this – what in the world are they thinking that when the bill isn’t paid THEY CUT OFF ACCESS TO THE BILL PAYMENT SYSTEM SO YOU CANNOT FIX THE PROBLEM?!?!?!  What should have been a 5 minute problem turned into a marathon of frustration.

Think about this just a bit – their solution is to prevent you from logging into the system to fix the problem.  Perhaps your first thought is “well, maybe their systems suck and they can’t just disable the server while allowing you to log into your account?”.  Ah, if only it were so – note that she very quickly and easily gave me access back to the account after I was forced to call them (and only to be told that I had to go into the account online to update it!).

One final insult –  after all this, they charge me a $50 reconnection fee.  Dicks.  I should charge them for my wasted time.

In summary Dear Reader, please consider if you want to do business with a company that treats you like this.  If you have a server you need to be up, and you want to host it somewhere, I cannot recommend The Planet.  Go elsewhere and put these jerks out of business.

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No wonder people hate insurance companies…

Posted on March 21, 2010 by ericgharrison

In one year, health insurance with a $5000 deductible has climbed from $118 up to $207 per month.  No claims, no nothing.

In another instance, on a different policy, they paid the first claim, no problem, then when the procedure had to be repeated, they held up the claim for 3 months, then when I called them, they said that the problem had been resolved and they would pay it in the next two weeks.  What problem?  Nothing they could describe.

A simple 15 minute doctors visit resulted in a charge of $500.  After the insurance company reviewed it, the rate was cut to $150.  Unreal.

I might hate what’s happening in Washington right now, but the insurance companies and doctors are bringing this on themselves.

We’re doomed.

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