hardware

Handy iMac Hardware Troubleshooting Tools

The AppleCare support staff (phone support) have been very knowledgeable and helpful, except for not knowing about the authorized service center in northern Colorado (see previous post). Eli helped me yesterday with 2 useful tools I thought I'd share today for anyone else having problems with their Mac.

The first tool is the standard Apple Hardware Test (AHT). He had me get to it by inserting the Applications disk that came with the iMac, then restarting the computer. As soon as it turns to a black screen press and hold the "d" key. It will eventually bring up the Apple Hardware Test. If it fails, it will return an error code the Apple service people can decode, in my case a "hard drive sensor mis-reporting". You can learn more about this on the Apple site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

The second tool is actually not an Apple-authored piece of software although it is found on their website, and it's quite useful. It's a Dashboard Widget called iStat Pro. This handy little app displays such useful things as the temperature of your computer, your fan speeds (mine were increasing constantly), CPU and Memory resources and more. http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/istatpro.html


5 Week Old iMac Broken, Again

Remember my favorite friends at the Apple Store at Flatiron Crossing? The ones who told me a bunch of incorrect things about the iMac and its software when selling it to me, who sold me a computer with a bad hard drive, who gave me attitude when I returned it for repair, who told me I should change the way I do things rather than make the computer work for me, and who theoretically fixed my broken computer? They broke it in the process of "repairing" it. Not only were they a day late in getting it fixed, according to an AppleCare Support diagnosis they either didn't replace my hardware sensor as they should when they replaced the hard drive, or they didn't hook it back up securely. There's a small chance that they simply replaced the bad hard drive with a hard drive that has a bad sensor, but that's "unlikely".

One good piece of news I can confirm for people living in northern Colorado - unbeknownst to the majority of AppleCare support folks, as helpful as they are, there is indeed an Authorized Apple Service Center (reseller too) in Fort Collins, Colorado. They're The Mac Shack, at 157 N College, on the west side between Mountain and Laporte Aves. I'll report back on their service when I get my iMac back from them. No more trucking all the way to Boulder or Broomfield! http://www.themacshack.net/

One other good piece of news I can in all honesty credit Apple with: the box the iMac comes in is nice and sturdy, and has withstood all this traveling around northern Colorado. Maybe that's what the $2000 was for, the hardware is crap but at least you can cart it around in a sturdy box to get it repaired frequently!


Hearing a Clicking Sound?

Are you hearing a clicking sound from your computer or an external hard drive? Clicking sounds are not good. My iMac hard drive clicked for the first month I had it. It reminded me of a miniature Irish step-dancing troupe inside the computer, dancing up a storm. Now that I have a new hard drive in it, I haven't heard the step-dancers at all. That's good, right? If only the fans were working properly...

More to the point, when talking to Apple support they acknowledged that when you hear clicking sounds, that typically means the hard drive is failing. She described it as sounding like a gerbil running around inside the computer.

To top it all off, my external Seagate hard drive has been clicking as well. It hasn't clicked a lot and it is also brand new, so I didn't worry much about it. Turns out that one shouldn't be clicking either. When I tried to re-install my iMac from my Time Machine hard drive, thankfully it did recover completely. It counts down how many minutes are left to restore from the backup, and whenever the hard drive started clicking, the minutes would increase. Clicking stops, minutes decrease. Clicking starts, minutes increase. Direct correlation between the two. I'm grateful that I could actually recover my system, but now I get to go back to Dell and complain about the hard drive they sold me, and hopefully get that replaced before I need a complete recovery and my backup fails.