Category Archives: MacBook

Device Removal

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I don’t touch anything, and my slow first generation MacBook will randomly come up with the above message. Maybe an uptime of 13 days is the cause? 
It is about time I rebooted into Kubuntu to get some updated maps on to my phone for TMJ. There has some considerable improvements in the maps in Edinburgh, and I don’t know what actually needs to be mapped when I’m out in the field.

Clean re-install of Mac OS X

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Today I have spent some time re-installing Mac OS X on my MacBook. It has been over a year now since I have bought the MacBook, and have only once done a clean install on it so far. 

It is now a lot faster as I don’t have any junk lying around running in the background. That’s one problem of installing various bits of software to see what it does and then not using it again. Maybe I should unsubscribe from the VersionTracker daily mail of new software releases. I’ve also gained around 20GB on my internal hard drive. 
Of course prior to the clean re-install, I had create a complete bootable backup of my hard drive, thus allowing me to selectively recover anything that I need.

I should now be able to use the OpenOffice.org CWS tools again as I’ll setup my local cvs server on a different port than the default port.

Can launch PPC apps again

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Since installing the Quicktime 7.2 and iTunes 7.3.1 updates on my MacBook, I’ve been unable to launch PPC applications through Rosetta. It appears that having Java 6 installed has caused the prebinding process to crash.

Following the process documented in a comment by Darlene on a blog, I’ve been able to launch PPC applications through Rosetta again. The process is basically removing Java 6 and then force running the prebinding process. I didn’t even need a restart which is nice.
EDIT: I’ve also had to download and install Java for Mac OS X 10.4 Release 5 to get Java working again.

Two Weeks and had to re-install OS on MacBook

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Today I came accross a nice little problem on my MacBook that I have only had for 2 weeks. I had a bit of a crash and oh dear, I could no longer launch application after a Safari hang. On reboot, it just hung. So I ended up doing an archive and install, with no ability to transfer the user over to the new system 🙁
So I’m now back with a clean system, albeit with only 8GB of space left on a 80 GB HD. Hopefully this isn’t going to happen again.
So now I’m off to the time consuming task of pulling back all my old settings.

 

MacBook loses battery life with single core

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I’ve been trying out the MacBook on both dual and single core mode. With the help of CoreDuoTemp Utility and Apple’s Developer Tools, I have found that it will always run at full processor speed of 2 GHz when you use the processor in single core mode. On the other hand under dual core mode it will generally run at 1.5 GHz, occasionally dropping to 1.333 GHz.

Even while it is compiling fink in the background, the processor is mostly running at 1.5 or 1.83 GHz in the lower powered parts of the compiler, slower than the 2 GHz max per core.

I do think that the power management could be improved to allow the processor to SpeedStep down to the minimum 1 GHz. Maybe someday Apple will produce a firmware update that will do this.