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WILL

Computer Down

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WILL
, 31-10-2011 at 04:19 AM (116778 Views)
Well it would seem that my plans to provide more news posts and start promoting PGD and Pascal Gamer before I left in November have collapsed.

My slightly over one year iMac has gone wonky on me and I cannot seem together it to work again with reinstalls and diagnostic tools. Therefore there must be a hardware issue of which I'll have to send it in together it fixed. Sadly that will take more time than I an spare as it means a 3 hour drive to the next major city of where there is an Apple Store where it can be dropped off. Since the weekend has come and gone I can either take a day off work or wait until the next weekend to drive there myself.

From then I will most likely have to wait at least a week just to get an answer back or for some kind of resolution of which I will already be gone on my trip until the end of November.

So for all those who follow my blog and wonder why it has been a little slow these days, I've been a little tied up and my computer is now a 27" brick sitting on my desk. My iPad thankfully has been able to augment some of my simpler day-to-day simple tasks such as email and web browsing, however other more integral things such as generating graphics and other materials for PGD news posts, updating that Pascal Gamer website to promote the iPad app, creating documents and materials for the next PGD Challenge, etc cannot be done until I have my system back up and working again.

So stick with us as we push on and keep PGD going but unfortunately the exciting stuff will have to wait until December it seems.

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  1. Stoney's Avatar
    Oh no. That's bad news. I hope you purchased the extended warrenty from Apple.
  2. code_glitch's Avatar
    Harsh. I hope you got all your code and files off that machine OK - its a pain to rewrite stuff. Did you try linux? In my experience, if you can't boot linux in less than 5,000 lines of dmesg then its hardware and if linux does not boot - there is something seriously wrong!

    And you can theme linux to look like a mac (like I did) to feel right at home

    @Stoney: Don't the iMacs have like a super warranty because of the quality of apple stuff?
  3. Stoney's Avatar
    @code_glitch: I wish. Apple products have a one-year-warranty by default, but you can pay for an extended three-year-warranty.

    @WILL: You should try a linux "rescue" CD to check the memory and boot into linux and see if you have similar problems to make sure it's a hardware problem.
  4. WILL's Avatar
    Worry not, I have a Time Capsule and my iMac was running Time Machine days before up until the really funky stuff started happening. So that data is safe. Thankfully there is a 3rd party computer store that does business here in town and they are an Apple Dealer AND Apple Service provider. Which means I get the same service as if I were to drop it off at any Apple Store, minus the 3 hour drive each way. *whew*

    The 27" monster is in the shop now and being looked at over the last 2 days. It seems that they found a hardware problem with my video card (ATI chipset) and they had to order parts. They are not done looking yet, but seem to be doing a thorough job of checking it over, of which I am grateful. Nothing better than knowing your machine is in top working condition when you get it back because of the proper due diligence.

    The Apple Care Protection plan does cover you for both repair and phone support for a full 3 years from the date of purchase of which I am so glad that I got it and I insist on getting for all my stuff. (iPad, iPhone, iMac, etc) I've had to use it a couple of times and if I didn't get it for my iMac then I'd be paying to get my computer fixed right now as I'm just over the 1-year mark. I don't have it on my iPod Shuffle, but the little thing is only $60 bucks. The price just went up on the Apple Care Protection plan too, ~$280 now.

    So if my computer is in the shop, what possibly could I be typing on now? iPad? iPhone? Heck no, iPad was helpful as 'something' to get me by, but I'd not be replying to all these threads with as much typing as I am now. I instead made Apple rather happy and purchased yet another product of theirs as a backup to my iMac and for when I am away to continue working on my projects and other community things that I do, a MacBook Pro.

    I was going to get the MacBook Air, but it didn't have specific things that I would need, such as a bigger hard drive(flash storage), the processor was a bit slower, no CD/DVD drive, etc... so I figured for the price that I was going to pay it made more sense to just get the Pro. The light weight was a nice feature and the all solid state storage was neat and would have been faster, but for that I have my iPad.

    So now I have something to work on while I'm away and something to help take enough movies, music, etc. with me when I go. Issues 2 & 3 may be coming to the iPad/iPhone rather soon.
  5. code_glitch's Avatar
    (ATI chipset)
    That wouldn't happen to be THE HD4850? I recall Apple had a hard time with those drivers and integration into the iMac. Aside from reading some papers on what was going on at the time it was announced, if you google it theres one heck of a lot of trouble going on - garbled output, lock ups in windows and sometimes OS X - as for linux, the FGRLX drivers are OK - no more than that. A few calls are badly written as I can see by my Docky setup in Gnome. tut tut tut. Although $60 sounds like a good deal I'm surprised by Apple only offering a 1 year warranty - I thought it only applied to those liquid cooled G5s (I might be wrong on the model number) as the seals where notorious for leaks directly on the CPU.

    Oh well... Things happen I guess. Just out of interest, what CPU did you get on the Pro? The air has the i5 and 256gb configurations - plenty of kick for OS X. If you said 'I'm running windows and I want to play metro 2033 on high' then fine, more power... I see another very loyal Mac convert here