Macbook Pro firewire connections

[thebigcheese]

Well, I installed the control panel, but it says that it just uses the CoreAudio drivers. So yes, I'm using the default ones.

I haven't gotten it in a while, but there was one point where I got that greyed out screen and then every time I restarted, it would show up again. On like the 10th restart, it finally went away and hasn't showed up since. This was before I did any audio stuff on my computer, although I suppose Leopard was fairly new at the time, so it might have still been a bug in the OS (that got resolved, I assume). Lately it's just been the beach balls, which I assume are just a result of too much going on at once or something. I ran the IceClean program to clean some stuff up, so hopefully that will help. I still have nearly 18 GB of free space, so I can't imagine that it's just that the hard drive is too full (although I could stand to clean it up a bit).

It seems to work fine with Garage Band, so for now I'm assuming it's just the test version of Reaper being wonky. Having all these issues all the time has made me more wary about trying to get things like Wine to work when they don't the first time around. It just hung forever on it's registry lookup thing you're supposed to do (you have to install Darwine, right?).

On a somewhat related note, lately when I'm running on battery power, it will just shut down when the battery meter lists about 25 minutes left. Normally it would get down to 10 minutes and give me a warning first, but now it just shuts down completely and without warning. I don't know if it would help to just wipe the hard drive and to a clean install, but I'd rather not do that. I guess if I can use Time Machine to restore everything back, then it might be ok, but it'd still be a pain...

 

[dgatwood]

Well, I installed the control panel, but it says that it just uses the CoreAudio drivers. So yes, I'm using the default ones.

I haven't gotten it in a while, but there was one point where I got that greyed out screen and then every time I restarted, it would show up again. On like the 10th restart, it finally went away and hasn't showed up since.

Ah. Maybe a corrupt KEXT cache, then, or something similarly minor.

Lately it's just been the beach balls, which I assume are just a result of too much going on at once or something. I ran the IceClean program to clean some stuff up, so hopefully that will help. I still have nearly 18 GB of free space, so I can't imagine that it's just that the hard drive is too full (although I could stand to clean it up a bit).

Most frequently, the beach ball is caused by the foreground application being blocked waiting for the OS to page in sections of the application's memory from the hard drive because you don't have enough RAM. The rest of the time, it's caused by poor application design.

It seems to work fine with Garage Band, so for now I'm assuming it's just the test version of Reaper being wonky.

They probably did something like doing way too much computation and their worker thread fell off the realtime path (or was never on it to begin with). Odds are that yes, it's a bug in the app.

Having all these issues all the time has made me more wary about trying to get things like Wine to work when they don't the first time around. It just hung forever on it's registry lookup thing you're supposed to do (you have to install Darwine, right?).

Yeah. Darwine. If it hangs forever on the registry lookup, try a different version of Wine. It changes pretty frequently.

On a somewhat related note, lately when I'm running on battery power, it will just shut down when the battery meter lists about 25 minutes left.

That's usually a sign that the battery is failing. I'm sure they'll tell you to do a power management reset or some such, and there's probably a narrow chance that doing so might fix the problem, but odds are in the end, they'll conclude the battery has built up too much internal resistance and needs to be replaced (though I doubt the AppleCare techs will know enough to understand that this is the underlying cause). Plenty of voltage, not enough current.

I'd go ahead and call AppleCare about that if it's still under warranty. Usually they'd ship you a replacement battery and you'd send the bad one back when you get it. That said, I haven't dealt with that for a while. I just take the battery to our on-site folks and say "the battery is bad" and let them deal with it.

Also make sure your battery isn't on a recall list, and if it is, getting a replacement should be even easier.

 

[thebigcheese]

Hmm... Well, I just got some new RAM today, so hopefully the extra gig will speed it up a bit

As for the battery... I'm pretty sure it's not under warranty anymore so... meh, whatever. It works just fine up until that point.

Thanks for all the help.

 

[dgatwood]

Hmm... Well, I just got some new RAM today, so hopefully the extra gig will speed it up a bit

As for the battery... I'm pretty sure it's not under warranty anymore so... meh, whatever. It works just fine up until that point.

Rule #1 of laptops: always buy the extended warranty....

 

[thebigcheese]

I learned that lesson with my desktop, anyway... bought the warranty for my new motherboard, except now I'm selling it anyway... I think they must short out some wires if you don't buy the extended warranty so that next time you'll get it. And then, of course, nothing will go wrong when you have the warranty. I hate computers.

DMG archives have been opening strangely for me lately. Instead of the finder window popping up in front of whatever I have open, it always shows up behind everything else, which makes installing programs rather annoying.

 

[thebigcheese]

Got Darwine working today, but... first I tried running Reaper from my Windows partition, which is NTFS, so it wouldn't keep any of the settings. Then I tried installing it to the mac hard drive, but it couldn't read everything properly. It's really just not worth it. I'll use boot camp until the mac version comes out.

 

[dgatwood]

I learned that lesson with my desktop, anyway... bought the warranty for my new motherboard, except now I'm selling it anyway... I think they must short out some wires if you don't buy the extended warranty so that next time you'll get it. And then, of course, nothing will go wrong when you have the warranty. I hate computers.

ROTFL. Desktops are much less likely to have problems than laptops unless you carry your desktop around.... I usually don't recommend extended warranties on desktops, though I bought one on my G5 due to worries about the water cooling, and I'm glad I did. I turned it on one day and bang... spark... new power supply, motherboard, and front panel board. Ouch.

I won't talk about my laptop experiences. My MacBook is solid, my PowerBook G3 Pismo is reasonably solid (after a handful of repairs). The other laptops I've owned... my parents taught me if you can't say anything nice....

Of course, I've been known to make computers freeze just by walking into my coworkers' offices. Maybe it's just me.