Friday, October 7, 2005

When you start up a new Mac with Tiger, it asks you whether you want to transfer your environment from an old computer by connecting the old computer to the new one as a passive Firewire device. I did that Wednesday between my old and new Powerbooks. Just now, I connected my iPod to my new Powerbook to update it with recently downloaded podcasts. iTunes proceeded to remove all the iTunes Music Store tracks from the iPod because "my computer was not authorized to play the tracks". After messing around for a while, I found out how to authorize the new Powerbook. The help file says helpfully that one should deauthorize any computer no longer in use before selling it or otherwise getting rid of it. The obvious questions are Why doesn't Apple's own transfer software ask the user whether to transfer the authorization for any purchased music to the new machine? Why does iTunes go ahead and clobber the contents of an iPod without asking? What if the old computer was unusable? The only reason this happened is that I had to transfer my environment to a new Powerbook because the old was malfunctioning. Since it is the second time this happened in the last two years, at this point, the iTunes Music Store believes I have three authorized computers, even though only one has any of the music. Life is too short to mess around with this. So much for iTMS. Long live CDs. 11:18:42 PM

I'm starting to suspect that Powerbooks that work too hard for a long period of time start exhibiting physical burnout symptoms, especially with their storage subsystem. Evidence: I used to have a 1GHz 15 inch titanium Powerbook, call it T. T worked well for 18 months or so until February 2004, but then it started to make unusual hard drive noises. Eventually, T's drive would seize up totally and freeze the computer after an hour or so of continuous operation, but I could revive it with a gentle knock. This got increasingly bad. I was going on a trip where I really needed a computer, so I rushed to buy a replacement, a 1.25GHz 15 inch aluminum Powerbook, call it A. With just a few hours to spare, I managed to clone T onto A, thanks to frequent knocks (eventually not so gentle) to restart T's hard drive. T sat unused on my desk for one year because I couldn't find the time to get it fixed. This spring, one of my students needed a replacement laptop, so I told him to get T fixed and use it. Before that, though, I did a clean install of OS X 10.3 on T. I assumed that T would work for an hour or so, enough to clean it up, but that eventually it would start to fail. Well, it has worked perfectly ever since, to my student's delight. A's hard drive started to make funny noises two weeks ago. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, it froze while accessing the drive. I have a daily backup of my home directory, but I also tried to get an up-to-date full image of the hard drive for recovery. This failed due to a drive freeze that required a hard reboot. I'm leaving on a trip Sunday, and I also needed the laptop for my daily work. Not again. Rushed to get a replacement (I have a bunch of Linux servers, but no other OS X machines), a 1.67GHz 15 inch aluminum Powerbook, call it A2. Wednesday afternoon, I successfully cloned A onto A2, using the very nice cloning utility in OS X 10.4. Relief, although the hassle was not good for my work plans or my peace of mind. Today, I did an almost full hardware check of A with the TechTool Deluxe CD that comes with AppleCare, except for a drive surface check. No hardware problems noted, but warnings about a corrupted directory structure. Since I no longer needed the data on A, I did a clean install of OS X 10.4, and I'm now updating all the system software. No problems so far. What did T and A have in common? They were my one day-to-day computer, always in use with many programs open concurrently, with drives more than half-full, and lots of data traffic for software updates, document downloads, some computation. Over time, they seemed to get busier and run hotter, possibly because of increased work managing files as the drive fragmented. Could it be that the increased workload and thus heat started to cause intermittent faults in the drive subsystem? Powerbooks are beautiful and have the most effective software for a laptop, but their design is close to the edge... Maybe they are not really intended to do desktop work every day. I've heard related anecdotes from a few colleagues, and today one of them described an almost identical story to A's. He bought his A twin the same week I got A, and he had to get his A2 twin Monday. 9:36:30 PM