Apple

I’ve been having some problems with purchased music on iTunes since the upgrade to 7.0.1. Well today I got a call from the iTunes tech support team who informed me that I can’t authorise my laptop until I get my broken logic board fixed. Apparently when you authorize your computer it looks for some hardware information that my dodgy MBP can’t provide so the authorisation fails with this error:

Hopefully this will provide some help to other people with this problem because I certainly couldn’t find any mention of hardware problems causing ITMS specific errors.

I needed a decent FTP client for the Mac as the built in support isn’t very good so a bit of an internet search later I downloaded Fetch. This is the way all software should be, it does one job very well, no bells or whistles just clean design and simple operation. A full featured free trial later and I’ve handed over the grand total of $25 for a full license because it just works.

When I shut down my laptop last night I noticed that the battery had developed a bulge in it. Not a good thing as it can mean that it can be about about to explode! So I phoned Apple this morning to see what the process was for getting a replacement. They do a fairly good service with a new battery being couriered out to me within 3 days along with a box to return the old battery in.

On the down side this is now the second hardware related thing to go wrong with my Macbook Pro, and it’s only 9 months old, with the network port on the logic board frying over Christmas as well. I do use it a lot (like 12 hours a day or more!) but I’m still slightly disappointed as my previous Apple hardware has been a cut above it’s PC brethren. The most surprising thing about the call to Apple was the hard sell of the AppleCare plan that the support guy gave me, almost as though you should expect a hardware failure and why was I stupid enough not to have bought the extended warranty.

Not buying extended warranties is just a knee-jerk reaction for me as I used to work for a company which managed them for a major retailer so I know the enourmous profits that are made off these things. But given my experiences so far maybe I should rethink in this case.

My Macbook Pro is now running the latest release candidate for the next version of Parallels. It looks like it’s going to be the version that will move me away from BootCamp and onto Parallels full time. You can see the full release notes at the Parallels site but the two killer features for me are the ability to run Parallels using your BootCamp partition, and the new coherence mode.

The reason I haven’t been keen to move into Parallels full time is that for some tasks in Windows it just isn’t fast enough so the thought of runing two seperate installations of Windows, one as a virtual machine and the other in a standalone partition just put me off completely. But now I can do most of my tasks running Parallels in OS X and then, when necessary, switch over to BootCamp but still have all of the same files and settings without maintaining them all twice.

Coherence mode is the new ability to run Windows applications but outside of the Windows desktop, the benefit of this is that the distinction between OS X and Windows has become very blurred allowing you to pretty seamlessly work in different applications on different operating systems and not really notice the difference.

Even though the version I’m running is only a release candidate it feels pretty much there, the upgrade was painless and I’ve yet to see any bugs at all. When VMWare finally bring out there virtualisation tool for OS X it’s going to have to do something really special to catch up.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours watching the live commentary of Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld. Of course the main news is the new iPhone (finally!) and it certainly sounds like it will be worth the wait. Just got to count the days until a Q4 release in Europe now, at least it gives time to save up to buy one as they are going to be pretty pricey.

Over at Gizmodo they have posted an article about David Ciccone who has given up on the MacBook Pro as being a lemon after some pretty awful customer service.

I realise that even here you may get the idea that the MacBook Pro is not a good machine as I have only posted about the issues I’ve had with Boot Camp recently. In reality though, Boot Camp is a beta product and I knew that when I decided to make use of it, the problems are not show stoppers and the community support has been great over at the Apple discussion boards.

Other than these problems my machine is over 3 months old now and I am really pleased with it. In fact over the last few weeks I have been doing some radical consolidation of my machines so that now I only have two (at one point there were 5!). One is the server running this site, the other is my MBP. Because of Boot Camp (even with all of it’s foibles) if I need Windows then I just reboot and the performance is more than enough for even my heavy duty development needs.

The commonly reported problems of the frayed power cords and overheating have not affected me. My old PB got hot when I used it for 8 or 9 hours straight, so does the MBP but it’s not significantly worse. Likewise I’ve not had any of the instances of squealing or moo-ing sounds coming from inside the machine.

Overall I couldn’t be happier with my purchase and I think that given the cost I would be very quick to complain. I pay a premium and therefore expect a premium product which is why David’s experience is so unfortunate. I just want to try and put the other side of the argument which is not quite so interesting but, I would guess is far more common. Happy people don’t generally make a lot of noise after all.

I’ve been rebuilding my machine over the weekend, the problems I had earlier in the week with the 1.1 beta of Boot Camp were not isolated so I decided to junk the partition and reinstall. I thought I’d also take the opportunity to tidy up my OS X installation as it was running out of space. For my backup procedure on the laptop I had been using the Backup software which comes with my .Mac subscription. May I offer this lesson for you… don’t use the .Mac Backup software if you actually want to be able to restore any of the data.

This is a round up of what I have learned to try and help someone else out…

If you are backing up to an external drive which is formatted using FAT or FAT32 then there is a maximum file size of 4gb so the backup is spanned across n number of files. Unfortunately it seems that if any of the files being backed up are larger than 4gb (like your Parallels installation for instance) or are large files and happen to be backed up at the point where they would be spanned across two of the backup files then the entire backup is corrupted and the Backup software won’t be able to open it up!

All is not lost however, you can open the individual backup files by right clicking on them and choosing “Show Package Contents”, in the folder which opens open Contents, then Contents again. In that folder there will be a file called backup.sparseimage. This is a disk image which, if you are lucky, you’ll be able to open and navigate as normal to look for your files. What you’ll find is that some of the backup files won’t open. As far as I can tell they are not recoverable and all data in them will be lost.

Overall I’m not impressed as I’ve lost a huge amount of data. Luckily I had another backup which I could use instead (the benefits of being anal about these things) but it took a lot longer to get at than I had planned. So all in all the whole machine rebuild took about 12 hours but at least everything is back up and lovely again.

Hopefully this will at least help someone else out there who has similar problems. I do have a call open with Apple support but they are very responsive, if I hear anything back I’ll post it here.

So… the lesson is to always check that you can restore from your backups as well as doing the actual backups!

Over the weekend I took the opportunity to upgrade my Boot Camp installation on my MacBook Pro to beta version 1.1. It all seemed to go fine until I got to the office this morning when I discovered that the ethernet port had become disabled but not only in Windows, in OS X as well.

I’m still not an expert in OS X so after a bit of flailing about logged a couple of questions on the Apple Support forums. No luck there, although people are very helpful. So I went into Windows debug mode. The obvious place to start were the new drivers installed as part of the 1.1 upgrade. First of all I uninstalled them all and then disabled every piece of software that I could before reinstalling.

Looking back now I think the root of the problem may well be my firewall (which is ZoneAlarm). Obviously this is running all the time but after disabling it, reinstalling the software and rebooting into OS X everything was back up and working. I remember when I did the initial Boot Camp install that Zone Alarm caused a BSOD in XP. So the moral of the story is that you need to shut down everything, and I mean everything when doing anything with Boot Camp.

Now that it’s all up and running things are much improved with support for the iSight, better key mapping and some power saving (although the battery life is still much better under OS X than Windows). I’d say that they are one more Beta release away from a marketable product.

Update: When I booted up this morning the same problem re-appeared. Yesterday’s solution didn’t work so I got a little more aggressive and completely removed ZoneAlarm and replaced it with Norton Internet Security. This seems to have worked today but if it breaks again I’ll continue updating here.