I am almost at my wits end - my workhorse, my friend at all times, the one who is always there for me - my laptop is misbehaving.
This is devastating for me - every piece of work I do is predicated on the suite of tools I have painstakingly assembled here and to have to use another system is a major productivity slug.
What’s the problem?
The box goes to sleep in mid activity. Generally I can bring it back with the Apple button, but occasionally it requires a full pull the cable, pop the battery and wait for the internal power store to drain to get it back. Yes, as you may imagine, I have regained my type-two-words-and-hit-save attitude from my university-the-mainframe-may-go-down-any-minute days :) Its awful for productivity - I will be in the middle of looking at something and the system disappears.
The story goes like this - it started last October. After several dozen instances, I realised I was mostly typing mail when it occurred (this took a while to notice, as I do a lot of mail!) so I stopped using Gyazmail and changed to the icky default Apple Mail program (I still recommend Gyazmail - but I’m not using it at the moment).
And it stopped.
Hmmm… my conclusion was that it was due to excessively large datastore, and the system couldn’t cope with the swap requirements.
A month of so ago it started happening again (noooooooo!)
I looked at my use of mail and deleted heaps of mail from the client (one folder had 40,000 messages in it, none of which I needed to reference. Oops). All up I deleted 100,000 messages, and again the problem stopped - but only for 3 days (Three. Blessed. Days! ;)) then it started again.
Gritting my teeth, I started paying attention to just what I was doing when it happened. Moving the mouse, quite often, I realised.
On a flight of inspiration, I looked in the Logs (Apple Console App) and found a message about over heating. I googled the message and found a forum where other people had had the same problem. The fix from Apple was to replace a sensor just to the left of the trackpad.
We found a temperature monitor app and installed it - sure enough the sensor for the trackpad was spiking up over 100C and dropping down below -100C (if you aren’t familiar with the celsius scale, you strange american, you, water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C. Simple, eh?) Now, one might argue that my laptop was just overheating, but there is no way that it is suddenly dropping below -100C on a sunny Brisbane day (or even on a chilly vladivostock day, I suspect!)
So, I suspect a faulty trackpad temperature sensor.
I rang Apple who kindly informed me that I was out of the complementary 30 day applecare program and I could contact a reseller for support. Yes, I agreed with the stupid help desk man, and where can I find one?
I was referred to a company whom could not help me, but kept the box for 4 days and charged me $60 for the privilege (what kind of morons say ‘bring the box in any time’ and then don’t look at it for 2 working days?!?!?)
But they were able to refer me to AWA, who apparently are actually authorised by Apple to work on boxen and have a full suite to run on my little Edmund.
I’ve rung them and had a lovely chat. They suspect corrupt system software, rather than hardware problems, and suggest booting from an external drive. If the problem then stops then thats the issue and I need to do a reinstall.
So, tonight I hook up an external drive and see if my poor boy needs a reinstall or not.
I’ll let you know how I go - for the record, the box went to sleep 14 times while typing this entry…