geek question #587
I’ve been playing Mrs. Miss Question Answerer to my little sister, Haley Haylie and her pal Joe, who I met while I was visiting them in Jacksonville, FL (photos).
It’s a tad time consuming here and there, and I have to draw my boundries or I could turn into a FT HTML instructor via IM. But overall it’s fun and it honestly makes me realize how much there is to know!
This week I’ve been having MAJOR issues w/ my mac. First of all, I messed up the keyboard. Don’t ask me how – it’s kinda embarrassing, but let’s just say I am crossing my fingers that AppleCare fixes it. But it still works.. just missing a few keys & things. :/
Another slightly annoying problem is that my mac crashed at least 7 times today!!! Totally froze up!! And every once and awhile on restart, I’ll get the gray screen as soon as I start it up!
I got new RAM a bit ago (upgraded to 1GB), but it wasn’t working so hot when I first intalled it. So I took one out so that I could test which one is faulty. Well obviously this one’s not doing too well. But thing is, I also didn’t reset the PRAM after I took the 2nd one out.. do you think that makes a huge difference?
Any feedback is helpful.
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While I’m talking about crashing, let’s discuss my Dreamweaver MX 04 that alone crashed like 6 times toNITE! And not just any crashes – every time it seems to wipe out code on my pages. Literally it tears out code to where even if I saved the file, it actually mildly corrupts them! I had to start pushing them up to the server just to have a saved copy w/o having to go back and redo my last 5 steps (even though I saved! >:|
There are some things I really like about DWMX04 – and other things, like hech hemm… *STABILITY*, that drive me crazy! While I’m at it: It needs to have the ability to save your panel layouts, too!
Oh, and I hate it in Fireworks MX04 the panels on the right won’t close and keep the other one’s open w/o changing the height of the whole panel (which is probably why I closed one in the first place, because I wanted to see the other one more).
Sorry, this probably makes no sense… I’ll be lucky if even ONE of you knows what I’m talking about, but I just had to vent. Macromedia’s products for Mac are suprisingly bad.
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Ok, while I’m talking geek. I’ve decided I want a higher resolution monitor. I neeeeeed one. (slaps wrist & cries for more!) Yup. I’m addicted to apple.
My friend Eric just got one of these and I think my feelings would best be described by reciting the line spoken by (the blond, I can’t remember her name*) on “Not Necessarily the News” (1985), when I say “Luuuuuuuucky!!!”
*If anyone has more details on this reference, let me know. I haven’t thought about that show in forever – remember Sniglets started there?
I loved Fraggle Rock, too. I loved having HBO! It was a lifesaver because I was home a lot watching TV by myself as a kid.
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I had some more geeky things to talk about, but I can’t remember what they are. Night
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Willo,
i am nost sure that the PRAM is an issue. I’ve had problems with RAM in these finicky Powerbooks, so I always get the expensive stuff from Apple these days. Which sucks. I looked for a manual for the 15 inch and couldn’t find one specifically, there is stuff for the 17 and 12 inch( http://www.info.apple.com/support/manuals.html#powerbook)
Anyway, the RAM for the 17 inch has to be
1.25 inch, 256 or 512 MB, 200 pin and
PC 2700 DDR 333 type RAM
It’s the last bit which may screw you, although I don’t know if it is standard or not. I got stuff from Fry’s once which just didn’t work.
Hi Willo – I followed a link here from Eric’s site (I’m his dad). There’s a nice little app called Applejack http://sourceforge.net/projects/applejack/ that might help here. Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback Eoin & Phil….
I think I have the right RAM, and I got it from Crucial which is supposedly one of the best to order RAM from… but I think it’s safe to say these powerbooks are finicky for sure.
As for Applejack – there’s all these warnings about backing up profiles and not using it while logged in as a user? I am afraid to use it! It seems a little more complicated and I’m scared of messing something up… any advice there?
I would say go straight for the new 30 in.- but it requires the NVIDIA graphics card 6800- which you can’t get in a laptop (yet). I would go for the 20 or 23 in. Or—- if you held off for a while Apple is developing the new PowerBook G5 that will have a WAYYY better monitor.
*Joe*
WILLOOOOOO!!!!-
RESPONSE TO “geek question #587″–
OK!!!
MIS.PROBLEM MAKER!!! OK!, I DOWNLOAD THIS DREAMWEAVER UPDATE AND IT CRASHES MY COMPUTER!!! AND I WAS REFERRED TO IT BY YOU!! SO HERE IS MY QUESTION-
WHY THE HECK DID YOU TELL ME TO DOWNLOAD AN UPDATE IF IT WAS ALREADY CRASHING YOUR COMPUTER LIKE CRAZY!!!
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr.
*joe*
UM excuse me… MRS. question answerer.. When in the World did you become a Mrs?! If you didn’t remember our English lesson about pronouns, Mrs is a pronoun. AND SO IS MS! So I don’t know if you are keeping your secret relationship with Rick and you two are already happily wed and married and LYING to the world, then I guess that is a different story, but STILL you should at least get your facts right. SHEESH!!
Oh, sorry, my bad, Mrs. AND Ms. are PROPER nouns.. I er.. think.
I’m guessing that you don’t share your Mac and are the only user (so there won’t be other profiles). If so Applejack will be a snap for you. Download and use the Simple Install; restart holding down Command-S after the bong; then type applejack and hit enter at the prompt; then type a and hit enter (for auto mode). Applejack will then clean up some of the nastiness left by those crashes. It will tell you what it’s doing and finding and when it’s done you simply type reboot and hit enter.
Printing out the Read Me is always a good idea.
Have you checked the Logs in Apple System Profiler? Even though they are pretty cryptic, sometimes you can get a clue about what’s happening to your machine from them.
Good luck!
Phil
(Thanking the computer gods for my currently stable machine.)
hi Willo et al,
Not sure if your DW crashes are related to your other system crashes (re: keyboard) but try wiping your User Data folder for DW (after you quit):
~/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Dreamweaver MX 2004 — delete this folder – it will be recreated when DW launches.
You’ll need to reinstall any extensions, but otherwise DW should proceed as normal. You may also consider wiping your ~/Library/Preferences/Dreamweaver MX 2004 file if you’re still experiencing problems.
What can happen during any crash is that files can get corrupted (”jacked” in the common parlance). The Mac is very good about recovering from system crashes by evoking the journaling feature during restart. This doesn’t always help with corrupted files that aren’t part of the system itself.
Hope this helps – definitely write me if not.