I've been on the road since Friday, living on my 12-inch PowerBook
G4.
The balky battery I've been complaining about is lasting about 2 hours
or so, a bit better since I adjusted energy saving features and software
settings on my EarthDesk
desktop picture. But that's still not nearly long enough.
I have no idea whether the replacement battery Apple promised last
Monday to have delevered in two days has ever arrived at my home back in
Michigan. I did hear from an Apple Corporate Relations rep by e-mail
today who wanted to discuss my postings and complaints. I e-mailed back
giving the address in Florida where I'm helping teach a seminar. But
there has been no reply as yet to my request to ship a replacement here.
So I'm making sure the laptop is near an AC power plug. Wi-Fi via
Airport is keeping me connected to the Net during the day, Ethernet at
my hotel at night.
The PowerBook is getting lots of work and, except for the battery, is
working like a champ.
I'm back..on Wi-Fi at the seminar, Ethernet at the hotel. And after changing the preferences in EarthDesk not to update all the time, the battery life is pushing 3 hours. Not great, but better.
Besides a balky battery, the hotel I'm staying in St. Petersburg, FL, has only dial-up access and I'm having trouble making a connection. I'm helping teach a seminar down here at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies that starts Sunday afternoon and there's a terrific Wi-Fi setup for my Airport there. But good Internet acccess will be spotty till then.... and yes, I have brought along the PowerBook G4 laptop. Still no battery replacement from Apple. I'll call them Monday and see if I can get one FedExed here... and I have my Dell as backup.
MIKE
WENDLAND: MacHack organizers stick with June conference plan The
hack must go on.
That's what the sponsors of MacHack say after finding out that Apple
Computer has rescheduled a major conference for the same date as their
annual brainstorming convention in Dearborn, MI.
The hacking that MacHack folks do is benign. They're not developing
worms or figuring out how to break into computers. Instead, they tweak,
refine and add functionality to various programs that work with Apple
computers.
They've been doing this for 18 years, and usually gather a fiercely
loyal crowd of several hundred top application developers from all over
the world at Dearborn's Fairlane Holiday Inn. But last week, Apple
stunned MacHack organizers by suddenly rescheduling its much larger
Worldwide Developer Conference in California for near the same weekend
in June.
Normally, Apple's conference is in May. The reason for the switch wasn't
given, though most believe it's because the next test version of
Apple's OS X operating system won't be ready to be publicly shown in
May.
MacHack organizers decided to stick with their schedule.
"People have had arrangements in place for months now," says Dave
Koziol, a software engineer from Ann Arbor and the MacHack conference
chairman. "We polled our people, and they said they'd still rather come
to ours."
MacHack details can be found at www.machack.com.
The battery on my 12-inch PowerBook G4 is getting worse day by day.
I'm down to not much more than an hour's use.
Apple promised a replacement on Monday. They said I'd have it by
Wednesday.
It still hasn't arrived and I leave in the morning for a week-long road
trip in which I need to use a laptop all day, each day.
I have been so busy with the war - blogging news updates on my E-Journal
site - that I haven't had the time to harass them.
But I shouldn't have to harass them. They should do what they promise. I
am really steamed.
This laptop is basically useless with a battery that dies so fast.
The good will I had towards the three tech reps who promised to rush me a
replacement has evaporated.
I can't afford to be stuck on the road with a piece of junk.
I guess... gasp... I'll have to revert to my old - but trusty - Dell.
Man, the PC types are going to delight in this.
Apple, you really let me down.
I gotta go. I'll be up all night transferring the files I need to the
Dell.
No posts here... all my efforts for past couple days are going to war
bloggin' on Mike
Wendland's E-Journal.
But all my work is being done on my Macs....
I called Apple this morning about the dwindling capacity of the
battery on my 12-inch PowerBook G4.
Jack, the service tech, told me to hold down the control-option-shift
keys and the power on-off button for 10 seconds. That resets the
internal power management settings of the PowerBook, explained the tech.
"We've found this often works," he said. "Sometimes the power
management thinks it has fully charged the battery and starts trickle
charging before it is really completely charged."
He had me then charge the battery for two hours, after which I was to
unplug the charger and turn the computer on. The battery should show a
much longer capacity, he said. If not, call them, give them my case
number and they'd send me a new battery.
Well.... I did that.
And...
After two hours... the battery showed only 1:39 minutes.
I called back and got another tech rep, Brian, who took my case number
and put me on hold for a couple of minutes. As we talked, he seemed to
be convinced that the issue was somehow related to the 10.2.4 upgrade. I
went on hold again and Thomas, a PowerBook tech specialist came on and
arranged to ship me a new battery. He said they wanted the old battery
sent back to a special address so they can try and figure out what went
wrong.
Bottom line: I was very impressed by the concern I heard from these
three Apple techs. I've dealt with lots of different PC companies and
these guys really seemed to care.
I'll be calling Apple this morning about my failing G4 battery after
lots of posts and e-mail from other users who have experienced similar
problems. Yesterday, after a full charge, I booted it up and it showed
ony 1:34 battery time left. It's not getting better.
But I'm noticing something else: The fan is coming on a lot more. When I
first got it, I seldom heard the fan. In fact I didnt even think it had
one.
But now, after ten minutes or so of use, the fan kicks on for 30 seconds
to a minute. Obviously that's contributing to the battery drain. But I
wonder if it's an indication of still another problem or somehow linked
to the battery?
What's with this? On a full charge, my 12-inch PowerBook G4battery
life meter shows just 1:47 left. I got about two hours earlier today
before getting the re-charge warning.
New, it was close to 3 hours.
I followed the instructions and drained the first charge down to zilch
but over two months of use, there's no doubt now that I'm getting less
and less out of a full charge.
Anyone else having similar problems?
Apple's had it with Safari build testers who can't keep a secret. One of them sends me this:
"Due to Safari 67 postings to the internet, we have closed the Safari Seed project. We know that the majority of you are not responsible for the leaks to the internet, and we sincerely appreciate your feedback, time and effort with this project."My source says that's from an Apple e-mail sent to all Safari Seed members - those who got pre-release builds of the officially-still-a-beta Safari browser.
Not a lot of time to update this Mac blog. I've been doing 18-hour
days blogging the war on my main E-Journal
and following war-related tech developments for my newspaper
columns.
But I've been doing it all on my Macs... using my G4 as the main
machine, with a Sky
News or MSNBC
windows streaming live war coverage video. I use the 12-inch PowerBook
when I need to move around, even taking it down the the exercise room so
I don't miss IM's or e-mail or breaking stories.
The Macs have performed flawlessly and been enjoyable to use.
I may not be updating this site as much as I'd like but head over to Mike
Wendland's E-Journal for the latest.
Al Gore joins Apple board I still wouldn't vote for him, but I admit, learning that the father of the Internet is "an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro" makes me like him better.
I do a lot of talks and teaching and use PowerPoint to show and tell. I spent a couple hours last night trying to convert a PowerPoint over to Keynote. What a mess. It would have been quicker to have simply redone all the slides. I ended up freshening up the PowerPoint and will use that in a talk I have to do this afternoon. But then I remembered this site, by Brian Peat and wish I had checked it before frittering away all that time. I have a week-long teaching road trip coming up in a couple weeks and will try converting all those oldf PowerPoints over to Keynote again, this time following the tips and suggestions on Brian's site.