Smacking lusers with the clue-by-four (the new tech support thread)

[diesel_powered]

Anybody want to make a guess as to why my macbook gets it in its stupid little head to stubbornly disconnect from the wireless around these parts?

Symptoms range from floundering around, looking for networks and finding none to connecting, but getting a self-assigned IP to getting a proper IP, but not actually being connected to the internet (i.e. pages won't load, iChat won't connect, etc.)

Thus far, I've reset Safari, repaired my boot disk from the Snow Leopard install disk, and run Onyx to do all the maintenance scripts, dump caches, and repair permissions. Right now, I'm about to reboot and install the 10.6.3 update to see if that fixes anything, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

[clare]

Does it disconnect while you're online, or just fail to find the PPPOE thingy? We get "looking up PPPOE host" a fair bit with both of our machines...so no, no guesses, only that it's a thing.

[diesel_powered]

Usually, it fails after a shutdown of some sort. Like last night, I let the battery run out due to laziness and when I plugged it in and woke it back up again, it was no go. Then, I closed it all last night and I worked again for most of the day. It's probably worth noting that this has only happened since upgrading to Snow Leopard, so I'm pretty sure it's a software problem. No PPPOE for me, though, since I have cable.

[diesel_powered]

Okie, update:

Ran the Snow Leopard upgrade, ran Onyx and repaired permissions and trashed all the caches, logs, and other crap I could trash, and now the wireless works again. But for how long? And why?

[auto-da-fey]

FUCK I just spilled my kale/banana shake all over my fucking laptop. I turned it upside down right away, wiped up as much as I could, but although it's still working, I can see green residue beneath the keys, and that can't be good. Any suggestions?

[Good Intentions]

Take off the keys and clean beneath them small amounts of rubbing alcohol -- even if you haven't shorted anything, that stuff will become very sticky very quickly. Here is a good guide for how to do a thorough cleaning.

[auto-da-fey]

Thanks, GI--very helpful. I was about to leave for the night and was concerned about letting it sit overnight, but since I don't have most of those ingredients, I'd need to let it sit anyway--but if I understand correctly, that's not such a dire situation, right?

[Good Intentions]

No, as long as you don't run the machine while there's water on the boards. It will make it a little harder to clean, but no biggie.

[davy]

My laptop is telling me that I'm running out of memory on my C drive, but that doesn't seem right to me. What's the best way to figure out what exactly is taking up so much room?

[diesel_powered]

Coldie told me about GrandPerspective, but that's for OSX.

[dieblucasdie]

Hey, so my old HP finally bit it; so I'm inheriting my gf's PowerBook G4 (PPC, if that matters), since she got a shiny new iMac.  Even though it's older than my HP, it's actually much faster/better, since we bought it with every possible upgrade Apple offered. 

Anyhow, it's going great, except that I have this small Verbatim 250 GB external hard drive/flash drive.  You know, one of the little 2.5"x5" ones that doesn't have an external power source.  Now, the PowerBook is USB 2.0, but it still doesn't recognize the drive.  Doesn't show up at all, not in the Finder, not on the Desktop, not in Disk Utility.  A little research shows that the USB on the PowerBook doesn't churn out enough power for some devices like this. 

Is there a way to make it work?  Is there some sort of cable or hub I can use to plug it into the firewire port?  Or would that be expensive enough where I should just buy a new drive? 

NB:  It's not a formatting issue, I already tried plugging it in to the iMac (where it shows up just fine) and using Disk Utility to re-format it to Mac OS.

Thanks!

[Thermofusion]

I use a couple iomega externals with my 12" Powerbook G4, and I have to run them through a powered Mi USB hub before it'll pick them up.

And yeah my G4 is still going strong after five years, I've basically transitioned its purpose to an ultra-powerful netbook since the thing's so tiny. Probably the best computer I've ever owned.

[elpollodiablo]

Anybody want to make a guess as to why my macbook gets it in its stupid little head to stubbornly disconnect from the wireless around these parts?

Symptoms range from floundering around, looking for networks and finding none to connecting, but getting a self-assigned IP to getting a proper IP, but not actually being connected to the internet (i.e. pages won't load, iChat won't connect, etc.)

Thus far, I've reset Safari, repaired my boot disk from the Snow Leopard install disk, and run Onyx to do all the maintenance scripts, dump caches, and repair permissions. Right now, I'm about to reboot and install the 10.6.3 update to see if that fixes anything, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Hey dogg next time this happens, check your location profile, set it to Automatic or whatever you use most frequently, and renew your DHCP lease. This works a good deal of the time; I don't know why MBs sometimes have such difficult with new networks, though.

[diesel_powered]

Yeah, I dunno. It hasn't been a problem for awhile, but for some reason it kept freaking out for some time after putting that network into implementation. The iMac had problems connecting as well, but now everything seems to work. One possible big deal is that the power circuit the networking whatnot is on got tweaked so it doesn't blow the breaker ever couple days. I think that was making everything agitated.

[clare]

OK, so the bloke busted the screen on my MacBook. The best solution in his mind wasto replace the entire machine, so i now have a nice new shiny white MacBook. Problem is that because the screen is busted on the old one I can't do the migration thing, as it seems to need two functional machines where you choose to migrate. WTF? Can't I boot up the old one in disk mode and join them with a piece of string? And while we're at it, what's with the no FireWire port on the new MacBook? Grrr.

Anyone got any clues for me?

[coldforge]

You can boot the old one into disk mode, but it requires a FireWire connection. If the new book hasn't got one then I suggest you take the hd out of the old one and put it in a portable enclosure.

[jess]

You can also get a FW to USB thingy if you have FW devices you need to use—I used to have one for an older iPod. Don't know if that would work for the disk mode thing, but I don't instantly see why not, and if you're going to need one anyway, might not be a bad purchase.

[Greg Nog]

Minor Mac problem:

I plug a mouse into the USB of my laptop to use it instead of the trackpad.

When I unplug the mouse, the trackpad only kinda works; it moves the arrow around the screen and can click on broswer links, but no longer calls up the dock when I move it to the dock's area.

After restarting the computer, the trackpad works fine again.

Is there a way to make the trackpad functional again that doesn't require that restarting?

[clare]

Well, we figured out a way...start up dead machine in disk mode, migrate my library on to the bloke's MacBook, then on to my new one. Complicated and annoying, but done. So shiny new MacBook happiness ensues.

Thinking of sending the one with the dead screen to the dudes who will turn it into a tablet, as the idiot at the Mac shop here seemed to think it would be super exxy to fix...

[elpollodiablo]

Google Sync just tried to add the entire address book of some user in Hawaii to mine. I'm looking at all of this person's contacts. Should I... talk to someone about this?

[dieblucasdie]

Yeah, my email is mylastname.28@gmail.com, and google sync is constantly trying to give me shit from the person who has the same address, just without the .  You'd think it would need his password for that, but apparently not.

[jm]

gmail has weird ideas about putting .s in one's email address.

[elpollodiablo]

Yeah, my email is mylastname.28@gmail.com, and google sync is constantly trying to give me shit from the person who has the same address, just without the .  You'd think it would need his password for that, but apparently not.

So what can I do to stop it? The dialog box pops up about every thirty minutes. It's pretty troubling; I had to remove my Google Exchange account from my phone and readd it with Contact syncing turned off just to rid myself of 175 Hawaiian phone numbers.

[Maaik]

So while I was up in Detroit, my MacBook died inside.  I'm pretty sure the hard drive is fucked.  It was giving me a gray screen with a question-mark-inside-a-folder icon.  Ran Ubuntu off a disk and it wasn't recognizing the hard drive, so yeah.  I think all my shit got fucked.  Haven't done anything with it since I got home--too busy and I don't want to further depress myself that like all the recent Mice in Cars archives just bit it, including the guitar tracks I just recorded a couple weeks ago.

Bah.

[davy]