A Day In The Life of a Mac User

[Adel]

(Sorry, just wanted to vent. I thought I'd post this here. Some of you might pick up on something and find it useful. Besides, its on-topic naman so it isnt out of place.)

A recent scare:

In my quest to speed up my aging system (at least to make C&C:G, UT 2004 and Halo tolerable) I was able to borrow a faster video card - an NVidia GeForce 2, I think, from extremyks last night. I promptly installed it in my desktop Mac, a Quicksilver G4 with a 32mb ATI Radeon 7500, when I got home.

Reconnected the tangle of wires and pressed the power button on the front.

Zip. Nothing. Nada. The technical term for it is deadma. Or more accurately, dead unit. Pressing the panel where the power button was on the flat screen didn’t do anything for it as well.

Crap.

Oh, well. Card was incompatible. I’ll just take it out and return the old one so I can go to work on my articles. So I put back the old card, and tried to restart it.

Nothing.

Hair rose on the back of my neck.

All my recent writing was on the machine, and I hadn’t had the chance to back them up yet. My deadline for two of pieces was lunchtime the next day.

I started to feel the first stirrings of panic.

I checked the connections, the power sources, everything I could think of. Still nothing. Crap.

Usually I get four hours of sleep a night and I’m OK. Last night I barely got an hour’s worth.

First thing in the morning, bleary-eyed, I drove to the nearest Mac reseller.

Conveniently enough, I was supposed to have a meeting with the owner of the company that morning as well. So I was going there anyway - two birds with one stone. Dropped off the Mac with the tech and had my meeting. Coincidentally, ran into Moderator Eric, who was having a new superdrive installed in his unit, so Eric sat in on the meeting as well. (And later on, we'd run into brain1976, who was getting her sister's iBook fixed and was buying a big hard drive.)

The tech peered his head in the door after a while and gave me the diagnosis – he just had to reset the Power Management Unit. Ah, relief. Later we tested it and it worked fine, hooked up to a regular VGA monitor.

So I paid the nominal service and I took the thing home. Upon getting back I reconnected the Mac, and …still nothing.

Ngek.

Panic time. Full bore.

I went over everything again, reset the PMU over and over, and …nothing.

Oh. My. God.

All right, I said to myself. Take a deep breath. What are you doing wrong? Or what are you doing that was different from what they did at the reseller?

After some thought, I realized that the only thing that was different was – they used a VGA monitor to test it. Not a flat panel.

I connected the Mac to a VGA monitor, using the other non-ADC port. It worked! The thing powered up and ran the way it usually did.

I grabbed the ADC cable of the flat panel and took a look. At one end, two of the pins were bent together. Aha!

I grabbed the video card I borrowed from extremyks and saw that two of the holes for pins at one end were messed up and just formed one large one. So when I connected my ADC plug to it, it bent the two pins out of alignment – and as a consequence, the thing wouldn’t power up. I checked the ADC port of my own card, and sure enough, the bent pins had gone in the wrong places, so it wouldn’t start up as well.

It wasn’t the PMU after all. Damn. So when the tech tried to start it, he wouldn’t have encountered the problem at all, since he unknowingly bypassed it by using a regular VGA monitor and the VGA port of the card. I wonder now how he came to the PMU solution.

Using a little knife, I realigned the pins of the ADC plug, and then forced back the holes of the two video cards’s ports into the proper shape with a small jeweler’s screwdriver.

Now they all work. Both cards are OK, and the Mac is running.

In the meantime, I lost the better part of the day, am out 500 bucks, and I missed my deadlines.

Haaay.

Could have been worse.

At least extremyks's card was 64mb. Now to try and play my games. I don't think I can work right now.



[Edited on 5-5-2004 by Adel]

[extremyks]

Whew...close call. Relax lang... :beer:

[Arel]

Shucks! Good thing you were able to bring back your Mac to life, CHAIRMAN ADEL! Watching MACGyver sure went a long way.

In fact, on your own, you did so much better than the tech guy.

[Edited on 5-5-2004 by Arel]

[caloysam]

Laro mo nalang muna 'yan :evil:

[Adel]

Video update: I have learned now from personal experience that doubling video ram produces a minimal speed bump as far as graphics are concerned. The graphics processor is the critical component.

Of course I knew this. Was just hoping that what I read would be proven wrong in practice.

Hard-earned lesson. End of story.

[penmanila]

hmmm.... i read somewhere that resetting the PMU once too often will kill your PRAM battery--a small cost, but just watch those dates or, you know where to look next if something else goes wrong.

[peter_ob]

Bent pins happened to me to. SCSI cable naman. Yes resetting PMU takes its toll on the battery. In effect your discharging the latent power in the electronics which the battery would have to replace.

[Adel]

Originally posted by penmanila
hmmm.... i read somewhere that resetting the PMU once too often will kill your PRAM battery--a small cost, but just watch those dates or, you know where to look next if something else goes wrong.

Hah! This from the man who told me that a CR2 camera battery will work perfectly as a PRAM battery replacement, and forgot to tell me that it's a trifle too big and won't exactly fit - remembering only after I had forced the CR2 into the battery cradle and broke one of the plastic stays! :dry:

[gonz]

Originally posted by Adel
Video update: I have learned now from personal experience that doubling video ram produces a minimal speed bump as far as graphics are concerned.

Perhaps if you increased VRAM to 256Mb?

Sorry. The geek in me is interested, but after your initial scare I don't think you're up to any more tinkering.

[penmanila]

that's right, but i don't recall saying "perfectly" sorry about the plastic, but think of it this way--your mac is now perfectly "adjusted" to accept cheaper CR2 batteries forever. (i've used them on all my old macs, by the way, and they do work! )

Originally posted by Adel

Originally posted by penmanila
hmmm.... i read somewhere that resetting the PMU once too often will kill your PRAM battery--a small cost, but just watch those dates or, you know where to look next if something else goes wrong.

Hah! This from the man who told me that a CR2 camera battery will work perfectly as a PRAM battery replacement, and forgot to tell me that it's a trifle too big and won't exactly fit - remembering only after I had forced the CR2 into the battery cradle and broke one of the plastic stays! :dry: