Poor Mom has really been thumped by technology bugaboos over the past two days. On Friday, her desktop G4 Mac froze. When she did a hard reboot (the ol' powerswitch trick) her Mac came back with a little "?" in the middle of the screen.
It's been a very long time - over ten years since I've worked with Mac's on a regular basis, but even I remember that the "?" is not a good thing. It generally indicates a roached hard drive or motherboard. Yesterday, Mom carted her desktop off to the Mac hospital.
Fortunately, Mom also has "Albert," her G4 15" Mac laptop. However, Albert threw a tantrum and refused to connect to the Internet. At this point in the game, Mom was extremely distressed. She called her tech support team - me. Even though I'm not a Mac pro, I volunteered to take a crack at getting Albert back on the straight and narrow. She handed over the recalcitrant Albert at dinner last night - along with her Aiport Extreme access point that had also gone on the fritz.
Evidently, the technology juju in Mom's house was very bad.
I've spent the afternoon with Albert and have managed to stumble my way through fixing his network connectivity issues. I also "zapped his PRAM," performed several other system cleanup tasks and am now updating all of his software.
The network issues were very odd - turns out that Mac's and Windows PCs have similar network pitfalls. A system can get confused if it has two active network connections - a wireless connection and a wired ethernet connection. I disabled Albert's wireless connection and was able to successfully connect via ethernet. I also had to do some tricky stuff on the IP address front. I used Albert's Network config utility within system preferences to perform the network config tasks. However, the utility would NOT display the IP addresses. So, I did a little research and found that by using the Terminal utility, I could display the ip address within the terminal screen at the Unix. So, I ran terminal and saw that, yes indeedy, my gateway had successfully assigned an IP address to Albert. I then happened to go back to network utility screen and voila, there was the IP address, the subnet mask, etc. It's like it needed a little nudge from the underlying Unix operating system.
At this point in time, Albert can succesfully connect via wired ethernet and the Partnow Manse's wireless network. Albert can now even connect to both of them at the same time - each network connection has its own IP address. That's a huge step in the right direction!
If I was a good techno-geek, I would document some network connectivity rules for Mom. For example, just to be on the safe side, I'd have Mom disconnect her wireless connection before plugging in to a wired ethernet connection.
In regards to the software update process, the Mac upgrade process is way way way more straight forward than the Windows process. Super simple. However, Albert froze four different times during the mass update. I had to do a hard reboot each time and had to Zap the PRAM once. So, it appears upgrade flakiness is not unique to Windows.
I'll probably save the Airport Extreme troubleshooting for tomorrow....
UPDATE: I couldn't resist - I went after the Airport Extreme base station. After a firmware upgrade and other odds and ends, it now seems to operating very smoothly. In fact, so smoothly, that just for grins, I plugged my desktop into the Extreme's ethernet port. Voila, my Windows machine is cruising along just fine using Apple's base station gateway. Now, that just has to be subversive!
4:22:17 PM 
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