Refresher  – I bought a refurbished iMac 27″ 2010 model from  the apple store on the 3rd June 2011 and apart from one of the USB ports playing up, the machine to my knowledge ran just fine. On Sunday the 11th Sep, I was using the machine and it worked just fine, I powered it down as normal, switching off the Mouse to save on battery. Monday morning I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I started to go through a sequence of tests, I got my meter out to check the fuse, tried a different power cable and checked on-line to see what test I can do. I choose to call Apple Support and at this stage expected for them to sort out this issue by means of a person coming out or whatever, how wrong I was.

What did I expect?

If I buy something and it stops working within a few months, I expect to either take it to a local shop for fix / replacement, get the company to come out and fix it or at worst for them to pick it up. The problem with Apple dealers is they are not common on the high street and only to my knowledge in major towns.

The Support Call

She got me to go through some checking, pressing 4 keys at once while powering on the machine (very hard to do while on the phone) and eventually come to the conclusion that it was in fact dead. She then started to tell me where to take this, I had the option of two shops 30 miles one way, 30 miles the other (plus bridge tolls) and 30 miles in the last direction. The problem with these trips is that I would have to finish work, quickly get changed and then drive to the store and try and get there before it closed. I would then have to repeat this once it was fixed.

AppleCare

They informed me if I had Applecare, I would be allowed to have it picked up, fixed and returned. I was going to buy Applecare at some point anyhow but just not now. When I got into work that day I bought the said product thinking that it would happen in the next 24 hours (as per the support call me told me it would) but no, it has to be delivered by courier and this is not due to hit my house till the 16th Sep – madness.

My next plan

As I cannot seem to get the  iMac fixed quickly, I will drive to the store on Wednesday and see if they can fix it by Friday.  I am annoyed that unlike say Dell who will send a person out regardless, Apple cannot provide the same level of Support unless you buy extra support from them. I still wish I had not bought this machine – long live Apple

Of all the companies that are out there, the one that I thought could get it right with a major operating system rollout would be apple. They stated that if you bought a computer from apple from the 25th June onwards, you are entitled to OSX Lion when it came out free of charge. The problem is, the servers that handle verifying if your are entitled to acode or not is having trouble matching serial numbers against inventory. When I headed to the page I entered my infomation in there only for it to tell me:

Sorry, we can’t find the serial number you provided. Please recheck your serial number and enter it again.

Apple Support – second to none

I Always assumed that apple support were great, I called them up and then went through the issue, tried it and explained to me that in fact the servers were overloaded and I was to try again either later on that day or in fact the next day. As this was the first time I had called and could beileve maybe that was the case, I ended the call but not before the guy was trying to sell me Apple care of course.

I searched around the web and spotted something, every time they have a major upgrade such as Leopard, Snow Leopard and iLife, people struggle to get verified on the apple site.  I left this until the next morning, surely this would be fixed by then right?

The day after the day before

I tried at 8am UK time, still the same, I called Apple support and got the same old story, servers are too busy. I took his name this time, he was called Kiren. He told me to try later, it should work by then – I hung up. I tried many times whilst at work and finally when I got home, I had one last go before calling Apple. No Surprise then that the page did not work and I called once again apple support, this took 10 minutes to get a person so they must be getting a lot of issues same as mine.

We went through the normal blurb and he tried to get his supervisor to maybe get an answer but he failed at that and asked if I wanted to wait for this guy or just leave it until one day it might work? The other suggestion he gave me was why do I not just go out and buy it if I wanted it that badly, after all it was only £22 or something.

I have a better idea on how to get Lion and no need for serial numbers – you failed Apple.

Its been a full week of my upgrade to the 50mbit and I thought I would write a post just updating people on how it is going and some lessons learnt. The important thing to note I suppose is that jumping around the speedtest sites and getting annoyed when it does not do what it says on the tin only serves to annoy you when in reality it could be the site your testing from that does not have enough bandwidth.

Do you need 50mbit?

The short answer is that unless you download every Movie, MP3 or game – then you can pretty much do everything with the speed before, in my case been 20mbit. Upload is only useful to people who stream, upload files to FTP sites or push YouTube video’s – of course they also help the Torrents if that is your kind of thing.

Does the connection live up to the hype?

For the first few days, it hit 50mbit and 1.5mbit no matter what time of day and I could grab files from various sources faster then I could find things to download. Once the novelty wore off with me either speed testing, downloading files or uploading to my website – normal service resumed to be honest and I would not know the difference between my previous connection and this new faster one. I still had web sites that buffered in fact – so not the speed I need but better streaming sites. A few days ago – my speed started to vary a lot and it was impossible to get above 768K uploading – what gives?

QoS (Quality of Service)

One of the options on the router was QoS – now this little function will make sure that one application will not consume. Th e best example is a torrent will not affect a Skype call – the router will slow down the torrent to make sure it has enough to make skype work. I was not aware though that this “tick in the box” would make speed testing or normal downloading swing from one extreme to another.

I called Tech Support and he said he had tweaked my modem and give it a couple of hours and all shall be well again. Three hours passed and still the same – but then I remembered about this QoS thing - could it be that it was restricting my connection and keeping some bandwidth for spare?

I removed the setting – did various speed tests and bingo – full speed once again. My understanding is wrong then of this function and it is easier for me to restrict a torrent say to 1/4 of my connection and manage it myself – at least I would have all the speed at hand instead of been restricted – lesson learned.

Another item I spotted while out shopping today and by luck I could test this out before even buying the item as they happen to have some office type chair for sale also (which I never bought of course). You can attach this to your office chair, your car seat and anywhere else I guess you can slip this on. The idea is it promotes correct posture and saves you having back troubles.

The Idea

It Pushes the base of the spine inwards which gives you better posture while sitting and will put an end to bad backs as we know it. My Office chair already had some sort of lumbar support but it was not a lot and as this was so cheap – I bought and fitted.

Does it work?

The easy answer is yes, as it sticks out so much (which is good), even if I do not sit back into the chair, I can still feel this support and already can feel the benefits. I would suggest buying one for the car, one for the office and one for home.

I recently had to help my sister out with a computer she bought from an Online retailer, some hands on and most remote control, I thought it would be interesting to read how I went from start to finish on working out what was wrong and getting it fixed.

Ordering the PC

The Company (DinoPC) offered a range of cheap, powerful and systems which you can tweak to find the right system, it is then built, tested and sent. You can pay extra to have it sooner which I am guessing means paying for a person to spend more time testing it before it goes out. You can also choose to have no Operating System installed, this saves money if you already have access to one for example.

In this example, she bought a Core 2 Duo 2.93Ghz with 4GIG DDR2 Ram, an ATI Graphics Card (she is not going to game) and a 500 GIG Hard drive, no monitor, keyboard or mouse as she already had these and no Operating system as this I had already, this meant the end system came out as £295 (about $470)

The initial problem

My sister lives about 120 Miles away from me so this meant the computer sat in the box until she came to my house, this is a bad idea as there is no way to get the computer back in the first 30 days if there is a fault. Once it arrived at my house, I formatted the hard drive (took a long time) and installed Windows XP Pro plus all the updates and used the supplied CD to install all the correct drivers.

Box Shifter

Before I go on, I need to explain what a box shifter is, anybody can set up a web page (company) with a choice of parts which upon getting an order, they built the computer from parts – much the same way I would do for example and chuck in the driver cd from the motherboard and the one from the graphics card. This is a far cry from Dell who have complete system on a couple of DVD’s and utility to grab the latest etc.

The Computer returns home

I thought at this stage the computer was a done deal and she got home and started using it but she was soon on the phone saying it had come up with a Blue Screen, this is known as the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Now I was not to know if a program had been installed, somebody had switched it off wrongly or whatever. I tried to walk her through the system restore but even this was proving too hard to fix over the phone with the system still dying upon starting up. I assumed it had got corrupted and explained how to re-install Windows until I got a chance to get up there.

The next visit

I took with me Windows 7 Ultimate (both 32bit and 64bit) and I got to work on trying to get this computer back to working. The first thing I noticed was no networking was shown up at all, not even in device manager. After I opened the case (not much to look at inside) I checked all cables etc and tried Windows again – magically the network not only showed up but installed and was working in true Windows 7 Fashion. I went through and installed everything but the sound was not showing up, I Used the CD Supplied and picked the Vista 64bit driver as time was not on my side and the computer was left updating and working (or so we thought).

The Computer dies

Yet another call – the computer has a Blue Screen! How can this be possible? I instructed on how to stop it rebooting so we can see the error and it was STOP 0000001A. We left the computer and then started turning to DinoPC to get this sorted, it was more then obious the computer had a hardware issue and needed returning.

DinoPC Tech Support

I was the middle man, I wrote an email which my sister basically forwarded to Tech Support, she works the same hours the Tech Support are open so no way she can sit in front of her computer and get them to diagnose this. They emailed her back suggesting that she download and burn the ISO of MemTest and test the machine. Now let us step back her one second, I have no issue with downloading an ISO, Burning the ISO to CD and pressing the right Key on the computer to boot from the CD and test the computer, after all this is my job but did they expect my sister to somehow on a computer which BSOD all the time to download an ISO, work out how to burn the ISO and use the correct software and then know what to do to make the computer boot from CD? Is this not going a bit too far in the realm of tech support and is a reason I am so against what I term Box shifters.

Many emails later

We passed emails back and forth until I eventually say down and wrote an email which detailed everything that I had done. What was annoying at one point was enquires asked us had we contacted tech support? Do they not keep records? Remember that margins will be tight on companies like this, so they do not want to be spending a long time on tech support and the like, with cheapness comes a price to be paid as they say. Eventually they agreed to drop the £40 charge to pick up the machine and test it but if they do get it back and it was proven to be working, they would not only charge my sister the £40 but also Labour costs – so now we may have to pay an extra £80 if there tech support fail to find an issue?

One last attempt 

I wanted to make sure before we sent this off that it was 100% not a software or driver issue. We got the machine running and I got in there with TeamViewer. The first thing I did was to find the make and model of the motherboard (ASUS) and get the correct latest Audio Driver. Once the Audio Driver was uninstalled (reboot) and new one put on, I was now at this stage happy that all the drivers were either supplied by Windows or I had the correct one installed for Windows 7 64Bit.

I ran the windows update and did one at a time, rebooted and carried on, of course all this been remotely, this took some time. We had it at the point now were we had a fresh install of Windows 7 64Bit, Office 2007, the Driver + Utility from Kodak for the All-In-One Printer and the relevant drivers and updates.

Event Log

I checked the event Log, this was Full of Kernel Trap Errors, searching on this it said either faulty power supply or do a system check, so off I ran the SFC /now to be 100% sure, this passed fine.

The soak test

She left the computer on from that point forth, nothing running and see if this machine could make it through the night – was it the driver that was at fault or did we have a dud on our hands? I got an email this morning saying it had BSOD once again – same STOP Error as before (0000001A) – case wrapped up as they say and next stage is to send it back.

Conclusion

Any goods you buy, get them out and test them. In this case maybe we should have bought a complete system with OS so that it would have come with a restore CD but looking at this company, they probably would have just supplied a Windows DVD. Was she wrong to pay the extra to get it sooner, would the 15 days they normal take found this issue and saved a lot of time? Paying the extra for the likes of a Dell at least allows you to contact support anytime and not just 9-5 type thing plus they have a simple process of you sticking in the restore DVD, use system and if not working, they arrange collection and a new system quickly.

In this instance, it would have probably been just as easy for me to buy all the parts (same as DinoPC do anyhow), build and test a machine and get the money, at least I would have tested the machine to hell and back. It would have been better if this company just gave my sister her money back and she could start again, this time with Dell for example. Lesson’s learned I hope.