As you have read all over the web, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer has passed away. A creative genus has left us, and he has left us better off. Goodbye Steve.
Steve Jobs RIP
06 Thursday Oct 2011
Category Archives: mac
My Mac Was Sick, Now It’s Not
06 Wednesday Jul 2011
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My Macbook Pro, aged around 4 years, decided on 7/4/2011 that it would not like to active its screen. Black. It chimed as is started, but that was it. I did the usual Mac things, like resetting the system controller. Didn’t work.
I took it to Argosy West in Prescott where Tony did some tests and found that the logic board (mother board to you PC folks) was toast. The good news was this mac had one of the defective Nvidia video chips that were known to be in some macs of this vintage. And the Nvidia chip in my mac failed a diagnostic test Tony performed. So Apple, to their credit, agreed to replace the logic board for free. Yes, free. On a 4-year-old machine. Wow. I’m happy and am even more of an Apple fan than I was yesterday.
MacBook Pro Battery Woe
14 Thursday Jan 2010
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My just over 2 years old MacBook Pro battery had to be replaced. The computer was raising the “Service Battery” alert. I tried removing and replacing it, but no, this didn’t fix the problem. It ran fine on a/c power, and also on the battery as long as there was over 1 hour remaining. Under that, it would shut off unexpectedly at random intervals.
So I took it to Argosy West in Prescott, where they ran a test on the battery and it needed to be replaced. They ordered one for me and replaced the bad one the next day. I had purchased the 3 year warranty when I bought the computer, but Apple only warranties batteries for 1 year. The new battery cost $130. And Apple won’t sell you a new battery unless you turn in your old one. There must be something of value that they recycle in the old battery. I thought about getting a third party battery (I saw several on the internet) but since I have almost a year left in my warranty I decided to get the Apple battery.
Apple, I’m a bit disappointed. Two years seems too soon to have to replace the battery. And I would have been happy if the 3 year warranty covered it.
New Printer: Samsung ML-2851
22 Saturday Aug 2009
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We bought a laser printer, a Samsung ML-2851. It connects to our LAN via an ethernet cable, so it’s available to all our computers. Well, after a major hassle that is. You see, the printer did not ship with the OS X software needed to configure it. I knew I wanted it to have a fixed IP address, I knew what that was by the port on my router. It did ship with a Mac friendly postscript print driver. It has a nice web based set up utility – but we could not get to that until we were able to configure its tcp/ip settings. After quite a bit of frustration it occurred to me to check out the windows programs on the printer CD. We have a windows based netbook, and we found an IP configuration program on it. WHY IS THERE NO OS X IP CONFIGURATION PROGRAM WITH A DEVICE THAT CLAIMS OS X COMPATIBILITY?? The printer test page, generated by holding down the power button for a few seconds, contained the mac address. Once we found this program, the rest was not too bad. Beware that configuring the tcp/ip parameters is not a trivial task, and it required a corresponding change to my router configuration. Not plug and play.
Initial opinion: We like the printer. Print quality is good, it prints duplex (both sides of paper), it’s quiet after an initial warm up. Mac support is seriously deficient.
WARNING!! Adobe Photoshop CS3 to CS4 on OS X
20 Saturday Dec 2008
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I just wasted much of my Saturday morning fighting with the brain damaged Adobe CS4 installer. Perhaps this post will save others some aggravation. I had Adobe Photoshop CS3 installed on my OS X 10.5 MacBook Pro. I got the CS4 update. Please be aware this is for Mac OS X only. I don’t know the traps the CS4 installer sets on windows.
- I did the install from the DVD. All seemed OK, except the installation process did not have the option to simply upgrade CS3 to CS4 – which is what I wanted to do. I did not want 2 versions of Photoshop on my system.
- After installing CS4, I tried it and it ran OK. I ran the updater and it downloaded some new files OK. Next step, remove CS3
- On the older CS3, the readme pdf file gave these instructions for uninstalling: DO NOT drag applications to the trash to uninstall them. To safely uninstall on Mac OS X, double-click the product installer in Applications\Utilities\Adobe Installers. Authenticate as an administrator, then select Remove Components and follow the on-screen instructions.
- I did the above. It took a long, long time but finished OK.
- Next, I ran Photoshop again and got this message:
adobe cs4 error
Here’s the message in text so that a search might reveal this post. “One or more files in the Adobe Application Support folder, necessary for running Photoshop, are missing. Please run the Photoshop installer re-install Photoshop.” Not good. I followed the instructions an reinstalled from the DVD.
- After reinstalling, I got the same message. Very NOT GOOD.
- A search on Adobe’s web site returned no useful information.
- A web search gave some hints: The error message is referring to directory /Library/Application Support/Adobe Note this is different from ~/Library
- There were over 17 thousand files in various folders inside /Library/Application Support/Adobe Uh Oh
- After taking a break to eat, I decided to use Apple’s Time Machine to restore /Library/Application Support/Adobe to what it was yesterday. There was 650 megabytes in 17,700 files. Time Machine did this easily. You are using Time Machine, aren’t you?
- Once this completed, I reinstalled CS4 Photoshop from the DVD. It worked!! No errors.
I hope this is of use to others.
Dagny's Desk 