On Apr 30, 2010, at 14:40 , Bob W wrote:
So whoever called the Mac a game changer earlier on in this
thread, that's what I'm sayin'.
In the two years that I've owned this iMac, I have generated
only 25 case numbers at Apple support on my 3 year extended
Applecare warranty, all software related (except my damn
25 cases in 2 years, from one person? That's a terrible record,
terrible!
Extrapolate that out across the customer base - you're talking about
massive
numbers and enormous costs swallowed up in failure demand - pure
waste.
In all the years of owning PCs running DOS/Windows I've never,
repeat never,
had to log a support call with anyone. That's not to say I haven't
had to
fix stuff myself sometimes, but not 25 cases in 2 years.
Allow me to clarify. In the preceding 27 years, I never had to call
Apple. Well, except early on when the calls were free and you were
most likely speaking to someone on the team that wrote or designed the
thing.
But I had never before spent $200 + on an Applecare agreement for any
of my 15-20 Apple manufactured computers, some of which still reside
in dusty corners of my home.
I admit this has made me lazy. My ADD and aging brain pan have made it
harder to muddle through the intricate and inter-related slugs of code
in the OS to see and recognize what should be there, what it should
look like when open. If I could, I would. But time get truncated the
older you get, and I determined that my time was too valuable to waste
fixing or troubleshooting the over 250,000 little files with nothing
but alphanumeric names to identify their alphanumerically named
contents nestled in 80,000 folders hiding in places that have no
correlation to their function. Like to see a sample of a log file??
/dev/rdisk1s9: fsck_hfs run at Fri Apr 30 12:15:18 2010
/dev/rdisk1s9: ** /dev/rdisk1s9 (NO WRITE)
/dev/rdisk4s3: fsck_hfs run at Fri Apr 30 12:15:18 2010
/dev/rdisk4s3: ** /dev/rdisk4s3 (NO WRITE)
/dev/rdisk6s3: fsck_hfs run at Fri Apr 30 12:15:18 2010
Eh? Who has the time for this nonsense. Unix gurus please do not
comment on how apparent this is. It in fact has nothing to do with
anything I'm referring to. But I can stare at it and I figure that
maybe two of my hard drives today blocked out a sector that might be
bad. Or they were not ready to be written to when they should have
been. That's another thing. This computer writes a thousand lines of
log every day, maybe more. Many are repeats that have been going on
for months or since I got it. No one wants to nor cares to fix
whatever is causing the errors. Everything still works, and they lines
get replaced or erased at some time, but my System Log folder (there
are 9 Logs folders scattered around willy nilly averaging 50 megabytes
apiece) holds over 60 megabytes of this unix gobbledegook.
So now I call when it's not obvious, or I'd rather not screw up and
break something that would require a re-install of the OS. I get to
speak to a drone for a few minutes so I can get booted up to tier 2 or
tier 3 or an engineer and we have a nice chat, sometimes swapping
stories about the good old days, and my problem get resolved. The
computer has never broken. As I tend to leave my machine on for days
or months at a time without a reboot, and because it seems to always
be a surprise to me how long it HAS been, a good re-start fixes many
of my problems. Example: my calendar (iCal, of course) started sending
me reminders of appointments I had coming up at this time - LAST year!
I did the usual checks. Clock set correctly. Appointments did not have
a repeat set on them. iCal knew what today was. So I called Apple. A
new one on them! Tier 2 advised me to throw out the iCal cache,
located a few layers down in the folder hierarchy within the User
Library folder and restart iCal. I'll try to remember to let you know
how it turns out.
Joseph McAllister
pentax...@mac.com
“ The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
— Kevan Olesen
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