I’m worried. I don’t know why it’s been down, but it has been, I’m going to make backups ASAP and if this is prolonged even move hosts. I apologize for the downtime.
There’s something wrong with XTREEMHOST….
Reply
Dead iMac G5
So, as I’ve said on my bio page, I’ve had several iMac G5s in my house. Naturally, any computer that’s not maintained well goes to the great gadget graveyard in the sky</sarcasm>.
One day, my littlest brother (we’ll call him, ch77) called me over, saying the iMac was overheating. After seeing the screen off and fans BLASTING. I pulled its plug. I tried to turn it on several times, a few days later…few months later.. till I just gave up and accepted that it was *dead*. Thing was, after it was plugged in + the power button pressed, it would have the light on, and do /nothing/, eventually the fans would start blasting. After a year or (maybe two?) I decided to open the bitch up and see what the fuck went wrong, as I do with most of my dead PCs. Naturally, newer Apple Computer products contain TORX8 and 5 screws….A substitute was used….a jewler’s flathead screwdriver did the trick for the TORX8s. The 5s I have not been able to remove yet. This did not stop me. I further disected it, removing the Lucky-Goldstar/Phillips monitor, removing the graphics cable with the FOXCONN moniker printed…etc.. It took about three hours to finally isolate the problem.
The PSU.
The PSU’s transformers and capacitors were blown, Joy. The coils also are corroded (notgood!) so yea. The blue board attached is an ATX5-12 converter board. The power comming OUT of the PSU is on a 5-pin cable, which attaches to the blue power distrobution board which outputs on a 12-pin cable. I have not been able to trace the other end of that 12 pin cable (Thanks to the TORX5 screws.) but I assume it’s going straight into the motherboard for power, It also branches off to power the SATA HDD and SuperDrive.
Lesson Learned? Macs are a LOT more trouble than they’re worth usually.
TYVM,
user.
My Night. Shot.
I’m aware the harder working members of my family have had a much harder night, but trust me, I’ve had a shot night too.
My brother has a Macbook Air, 13″, 2011. It has a Microsoft Windows partition on it. Yay! Good for me! Right? Wrong. The other day he came up to me and complained of constant BSoDs. After testing the machine myself this was completely true as the machine had crashed every boot, without fail. After doing some research, this is the problem:
Apple wrote a shitty trackpad driver, go figure, they’re not Windows developers. They write kernel-extension drivers for their OS (KEXTs). Fair enough. Then Microsoft goes ahead and releases a driver platform update for Windows 7 which just makes the problem oh SO much better. Once again, fair enough EXCEPT IT BROKE THE CRAPPY APPLE DRIVERS.
Lovely. So turns out it’s my fault for being a good sysadmin by turning on automatic updates. GAAAAAAAAA
So I’ve been sitting my ass staring at several computers hoping to get this one fixed. I naturally need the “System Support Software” (drivers) from Apple to kickstart this project off. Uhhh. Turns out Apple wasn’t going to have part of it. Apple has pulled the download links for all Bootcamp 3x users. Which is horrendeous and FWIW, and IMHO. Irresponsible and greedy of Apple. They instead would allow for Bootcamp 4 support…. If you upgraded to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
Your competitors aren’t sweet-hearts either but fuck you, you greedy bastards, Apple.
Great. No drivers. So currently I have an unactivated, WAT moaning, driver-less installation of Windows 7 on the Macbook, and it’s 8:17 PM. Not enough time to continue, nor do I have the energy at the moment.
Fuck you. Just Fuck You Apple.
But that’s life for ya. At the moment I’m just going to leave the lappy as is, and deal with it tommorow after school. Tommorow being Friday, I’ll be able to stay up later and deal with the issue. Great.
I’ll get some images for ya momentarily in an edit. But for now I have to pack my Toshiba up, and close the downstairs ‘computer lab’ up.
EDIT: B-B-B-Back!
<Image Removed due to getting corrupted (Seriously Byet? I’m thinking of switching hosts for this mess up.)>
This is my little corner of the basement. Excusing the airtight bag full of bedsheets and 30 year old scale (hey, I bet your folks use to ‘keep fit’ before turning all their equipment into laundry stands xD it happens ALL THE TIME to people!) Featured in this little family get together is my Dell Dimension 8400 XPMCE Machine, my brother’s Macbook Air, installing Windows 7 (packaging shown) by using a borrowed DVD reader/writer/lightscribe burner drive. To the left of the Macbook Air, my TOSHIBA Tecra A11, which I’m using to type this post on now! In the back, inside of the black bin, is the corpse of my brother’s dead WoW (World of Warcraft) machine, the old iMac G5 that had a bad PSU. (Picture of that ensuing in another post).
Problem Macbook Air in question.
The Tecra A11. Name naturally censored.
Thanks for reading,
user.
An Update.
meh. Life’s been suckish. First off, my school does not offer C++ anymore which is seriously annoying. I may have talked about this before but I forget. I’m taking A.P. Comp’Sci’ next year so that should do.
Additionally I’ve traded my DELL with a relative on the other side of the family for a TOSHIBA Tecra A11
- Intel Core i3
- 4GB RAM
- 802.11g Network Adapter
- 1x 500GB HDD
- 1x Built in Webcam
- 1x VGA Port
- 2x USB Ports
- 1x IEEE 1394 (FireWire/i-LINK) 4 Pin Female Port.
- 1x SD/MMC/MS/Pro Cardslot
- 1x PCMCIA Cardslot
- 1x eSATA
- 1x Bluetooth Device
Similar Specs. Nearly identical gfx card. Intel GMA HD. Due to recent drama I may have to give the dell back (not before taking backups of the disks!) and all too but I can keep the Toshiba.
I’m fairly happy with my setup so far. Also I’ve taken apart my brother’s dead iMac G5 and have found the problem…..the PSU’s transformer and capacitors died…
Ty,
user.
Taste.
Some people might ask me what my taste is in Webcomic.
Let’s Review
Reptilis Rex @ http://www.reptilisrex.com/ Funny comic, It’s relatively new but keep a close eye on it. It’s good stuff so far.
Not Invented Here @ http://notinventedhe.re/ Again funny, It has something just about every person in IT can relate to.
Dilbert @ http://www.dilbert.com/ A Classic! Who DOESN’T know about Dilbert? If you’ve worked in serious IT this is your story written a hundred times over. Dilbert is the oldest one here at 23 years.
XKCD @ http://www.xkcd.com/ Very witty and intelligent humor. Requires knowledge and a backbone to get into, and perhaps a dictionary.
The Joy of Tech @ http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/ A blog and forum which just so happens to additionally have a comic. On a serious note, this ones another classic in tech humor, 12 years in running!
Nerd³ @ http://www.nerdcubed.co.uk/ This one is mainly for the Minecraft nerds like myself out there. Imagine it as Doctor Who in Minecraft form. Very good so far.
Dyslogy Of The Common Unintellectual Computer User.
1. Shut the FUCK up about your email. If you dont need it for work, then you can live without it for a later date.
2. You think you are so important because your a paying customer? Good. Take a number and sit the fuck down. Complaining to Dell that your craptop which you bought does not work and that your a paying customer and that you deserve the best because of that? Guess what. There’s billion dollar customers out there who serve a gigantic part of our economy, so are you suggesting that the entire world stop for your pathetic problem such as “Dell resolution assistant starts up when I turn my computer on”? Get real.
3. Still demanding help? You fucked up the encryption of your hard disk or wireless router and expect a company internal representitive to give you internal codes to help YOU get onlien? Guess what sweet cheeks, there’s millions of people who rely on the same shit and you are NOT as important as them. 4. Are you one of those usual assholes who hates tech support for everything they’re worth for no reason? They’re NOT your enemy. Sure there are complete mental retards in tech support but that’s no reason to hate them at all. Remember, they’re trying to save YOUR ASS. It’s not very enouraging to help you when you keep screaming at them “YOU DUMBASS IT’S NOT WORKING HELP ME”, despite the fact they’re trying quite hard in reality to do so. Some tech support is literally bound to ask you the usual questions even if you “think” you know what the problem is, if they don’t, it’s their ass on the line. Remember, they have a wife and three kids too.
Another thing to add
Don’t fucking let people touch your computers. Don’t let people near them. Don’t let people have any potential time at all near them, it only takes 30 seconds to plug in a USB device that you’re infected with a R.A.T. or worm.
Thanks,
user.
My Thoughts On…Jack Valenti’s anus.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a ‘My Thoughts On..” Today, the whores at the M.P.A.A. have released a statement regarding today’s protests of the STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT, aka S.O.P.A. and P.I.P.A., or P.R.O.T.E.C.T. I.P.
Basically, they are scoffing it off that everyone is using rhetoric to make the MPAA seem bad, when the MPAA and RIAA themselves however, do the same to make pirates look bad. Let’s dissect this:
It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.
How Ironic, SOPA and PIPA were created intentionally to control freedom of speech and fair use intentionally by the corporate marketplace, It is ironic that the MPAA accuses others of abuse when they themselves are the ones attempting to change the law and skew it for their own advantage.
A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.”
As one has said before, piracy is an economic issue. It is entirely the faults of the MPAA and RIAA that their material is pirated because they cannot make a more economic base for them. As other websites have said, these organizations fail to innovate when a promising new technology comes along. They have tried to kill new technologies in fear that they will hurt business when instead they only have helped. An example of this is the VHS cassette, which actually assisted in the marketplace. The MPAA and RIAA should innovate similarly with services such as Pandora Radio, Spotify, in order to deliver their content in a more economical sense, while proving to ensure their income. The MPAA can do the same with an organization that it despises, this organization is named…………………..
NETFLIX.
Said organizations like the MPAA and RIAA have and will continually attack potential new platforms for their development while mis-evaluating their potential.
How can this issue be dealt with?
The ”AA organizations need to work with advertisers to create a stable income for people who use services such as NETFLIX and {Insert Online Radio Service Here.} to ensure their material is economic and available to all persons, thus reducing the need for piracy.
Thank you,
user99672.
I can’t shut the site down today but……
PLEASE do NOT sit back and take no action. You must do something to stop P.’I.P.[A] and S.O.P.A, if nothing is done, the Internet will be in complete control of the multimedia industry who will horribly censor any views that disagree with them. That’s right, if SOPA passes, let’s say a petition to remove it starts, if SOPA passes, that will allow the multimedia organizations to censor and remove all your signatures on your list as it can ‘infringe their copyright’, as they can claim anything they want with their loose legal interpretation.
Visit: http://blacklists.eff.org/
ALSO: The US government needs big change. NOW. We need to follow a certain CCPGrey’s advice on what the hell to do, and we also need the PEOPLE more involved in polotics, we shouldn’t just sign a person onto the job and have him bribed and not do that job, ALL the law should be judged by the PEOPLE as well before it can pass or even continue in Congress!
My New (to me..) Laptop, the DELL Studio 17(37)
If you frequent my blog you should know about my new laptop, and where I got it, however if you aren’t? http://brownstar.tk/?p=147
Or scroll down…
Continuing on, while we were in New York, We happen to go into a Goodwill and I noticed they had an entire rack of keyboards. A few Logitechs and DELL keyboards (ironic?) and even a flatscreen DELL monitor amoung them (wt*?), and I had mentioned that I needed a new keyboard for my main machine, my 2009/10 iMac. Frankly the USB keyboard is a PITA to use for me, the batteries are getting expensive, and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so I decided to use an older iMac G5 USB Keyboard. Fine and all but you know damn well that keyboards get rather dirty, fast. My 9 key, gets abused like an S&M slave in bed. I use it constantly as my nickname on various forums, websites, etc, is ‘user99672′. I have to wait a good 10 seconds everytime I press ’9′ on my keyboard to press it again, as it is so abused and dirty that it sticks. So I had mentioned this during our trip into goodwill and my grandmother, who again, thinks in 1950s terms, said “OH I’LL GIVE YOU MY KEYBOARD!!!!!” (meaning her laptop), which she never uses. After arguing with my mother for a few minutes about it, she let me have it (pwnage!). Next follows what happens in the post down the page or by following the link mentioned earlier in this post. So after getting home, I naturally cannot authenticate with the previous accounts on it, with exception to the account that had no password on it, after looking the machine up, there evidentally is a convience partition, after pressing F8 while booting, the BCD or whatever setup had an option to boot off of the convience partition and after using it and looking at the recovery partition again ((RECOVERY) D:) and skipping a few permissions…..etc…… it turns out just to be a generic .WIM file with all the DELL bloatware installed on it. So naturally I get it to connect to the internet, and start following all the generic Windows Update packages…..except it BSoDs……..Turns out that Windows Update, while messing with the webcam driver, causes IRQL_NOT_EQUAL_TO_OR_GREATER_THAN errors. This is a problem affecting all Studio 17(37)s. Fair Enough, I remove some bloatware related to the webcam and deal w/ it. The machine appears to be stable now and hasn’t had a BSoD since, hopefully it will remain that way.
Specs? You got it:
- Intel Core 2 Duo clocked @ 2.00GHz
- 4GB RAM (not sure what else about it..)
- 802.11n compatible onboard networking (original media says ‘Wireless-N technology’)
- 1x 320GB HDD
- 1x Built in Webcam
- 1x VGA Port
- 1x HDMI Port
- 4x USB Ports
- 1x IEEE 1394 (FireWire/i-LINK) 4 Pin Female Port.
- 1x SD/MMC/MS/Pro Cardslot
- 1x PCMCIA Cardslot
- 1x eSATA
- 1x Bluetooth Device
Now THAT’s nice. Yet I still have to worry about it going to BSoD on me at any time, so it is a bit nerve racking to work with, but otherwise it’s a nice machine in that regard. Let’s talk about the physical features.
It contains a full numeric keypad. Typical of larger laptops, I however am not that big a fan of it personally and don’t really use it. It has a very nice touch-screen button set that allows for one touch (not even press) actions such as standard music control, Volume control, Disc Eject, etc.. On the very minute negative side, the battery is very annoying due to its shape and how it pops out of the base, making the very back end of the machine raised, yet again, still annoying to use actually in your lap.
Otherwise it’s a nice machine and I’m pretty happy with it…..
except for the damn BSoDs….. Thanks a lot M$ and DELL….
Thanks,
user99672/Alan D.
>> Posted from my Laptop < <
>>Don’t touch the keyboard<<
BTW This machine is three years old, as it was paid for in 2009
In terms of Age from Newest to Oldest:
iMac
Studio 17
Dimension 8400
so yea, middle child 
You touch it you own it.
Own as in the corporate sense. Owning as in being the full technical support personel for what you touch. You pick your friend’s nose, you own that nose and get all the blunder for it. That is what happens when you help someone else. Who is that person in today’s morals? My grandmother. My grandmother is not a technology literate person. She publishes books for a living. She uses a typewriter, she has a 50 year old TV. That should be about it for her.
No.
After getting pressure from her friends to use e-Mail, my idiot of a cousin decided to get her a DELL Studio 17(37) Laptop. (ohgodwhy.jpg), a shitty machine but that’s a post for another time. She let my cousin be the System Administrator on it. Foolish Move. I’ve been to my cousin’s house and what was I doing the entire time during that family outing? I was fixing their virally infected computers. The entire lot of my cousin’s computers were infected to the point where any sane IT professional would’ve said, “…my god…You’re on your own! Pay me and I’ll fix it”. Foolishly I fixed one of their machines (the other was so bad and there was no time..) and of course it works in the end. Now knowing these people have a tendency to get viruses, a new Windows Vista laptop in the hands of a computer illiterate and a virus magnet, you can assume the outcome. Needless to say when I first put my hands on the machine, the result of the outcome I told you to assume was there. BHO, spyware, keyloggers, etc up the wazoo, and nothing I could do about it. We decided to give her my old iMac G5, how could she possibly mess that up?
http://brownstar.tk/?p=93
That’s one minute example of it. One example of her inability to use her computer is that she is not able to use her mouse correctly thus she kept dragging things off her dock. Next my jerk of a cousin demanded the WPA-TSK password for her router, so me and my father wasted 3 hours or so to drive there, get the password for her, etc. and waste more time.
What was it lately? I came to visit her for New Years Day… Rather nice, she gives me the virally infected laptop, yet she had plans in store for me when I got there. She had managed to mess up her Internet connection some how, idk how but she did. I turned it on and Mail automatically opened up and was complaining about her Internet connection. So I close all apps, go to the terminal and type in:
ipconfig ifcfgaddr en1
or something to that extend, I had to use the –? argument to get the syntax right, and saw this:
169.231.121.3
WTF? ALIEN ADDRESS?! So I simply turn off her router, wait 10 seconds, turn it back on, reset the network adapter in OSX and what do I get?
192.168.1.12
Yay! I get it working, but then she asks me to fix her printer for her, fair enough, I mess around with it and I don’t know why it isn’t working, she had just replaced the Ink cartridges and they were inserted correctly, suprising for her first time doing so. However when I removed the ink cartridge I saw something I should’ve thought of the first time. That she had typically forgotten to remove the pink/transparent sticker that comes on all brand new cartridges. Fair enough, I leave the machine working perfectly fine when I went home that day, two days later (day of posting this), she calls and there is a problem. I guide her through the steps (painstakingly) to see her IP address
Ok Grandma, under “Network Interface” and under “Hardware Address”, what does it say?
umm…..ok…uhh It says 169 point 1
OK STOP IT RIGHT THERE THAT’S ALL I NEED TO KNOW……..
I try to get her to turn off her iMac (she can do that better than press “Turn Airport Off” briefly), but Mail is complaining and I spend an hour trying to get her to press COMMAND-Q, yet I can hear in the background the ‘Submarine’ sound effect, so I decided to fix it Soviet Russia style, I told her to unplug the power strip connecting her router, printer, computer and modem to the power.
Is the gray thing that’s black on the top and bottom and gray in the middle the power strip????
…I know what that is, and that’s her Time Warner Cable Modem. So I say:
NO. The thing that’s connected to the wall but has outlets comming out of it itself! UNPLUG THAT AND PUT IT BACK IN
She does that and I tell her I’ll call her back in five minutes. In the mean time, I’m screaming. I call her back and tell her to turn the machine back on, she is now getting a 192 address. Yay, yet her email still somehow magically is not working? How could this be when she was browsing the web just fine? Turns out she forgot that she had let her friend change the password on her. When I heard this news that she allowed her friend to retain complete control over her account and that they were sharing details, That’s when I hit the wall and shat bricks. I let her HAVE IT. I said,
If you’re going to risk yourself like this, I’m not gonna help you anymore, I’m not going to accept calls pertaining to computer help, you want help after that? Go ask your friend <insert friend’s name here, I won’t tell it in public> to go help you.
So she types in her new shared password and it works. Job Done.
That my peeps, is why you do not own things. Friends need help? Don’t get your popularity for being a tech genius up and tell them what they need to know.
1. RTFM, 2. You want me to do it? Great, get your checkbook out.
Thank you,
Alan D./user99672
PS: Next blog post is gonna be about that laptop, which is currently installing Vista SP2.