Abby and Win’s Blog

Archive for February, 2009

At first we thought we got a good deal from this laptop. We bought the Acer Extensa 5420 from Best Buy back in December 2007. Abby has been complaining about frequent restarts and freezing. At first, I just told her it was Windows and to get used to it. Right after the manufacturer warrant expired (1 year later), Windows crashed. I didn’t create a restore CD either. I was used to having it come with a restore CD. Now I had to pay $30 to Acer to order the restore CD. I got the restore CD and tried to restore the OS. All I keep getting was a black screen. I Google’d “Acer 5420 black screen” and found many people experiencing the same problem.

Luckily I bought the Best Buy warranty. I took it to one close to my work. They kept it for a few weeks and told me that there wasn’t anything wrong with the hardware and for $150 they can restore the OS. I laughed and said why would I pay for an OS restore when I bought a warranty? Besides, it isn’t hard to restore an OS if the device was working properly. It turns out, the warranty covers only hardware failure. I took it home and messed with it more.

It looked like they took the hard drive out and put it in an enclosure. Since the hard drive was accessible, there was nothing wrong with it – F-ING NOOBS! I thought. So I tried more things:

• installed other OS (XP Pro, Ubuntu, Vista Business, restore CD)
• used USB flash drive to try and install Ubuntu
• used USB DVDRW to try and install XP Pro, Ubuntu, Vista Business, and restore CD

All failed and was left with a black screen. I even left it for about half a day on that black screen thinking it was just taking a long time – nothing. So I took it to another Best Buy and told them what happened. They were going to charge me $130 for an “extensive diagnostic”. I told them I’m not going to pay for that because I bought a warranty and whatever they were going to do during that diagnostic, I’ve already done it. The Geek Squad guy was more patient and I explained to him what I did and we ran through some things. He eventually sent it to their service facility. A couple of weeks later I get a call that my laptop was authorized for a “junk out”. They will replace it with another laptop with similar specs as the broken one.

I told them that I had already bought a replacement so I don’t need another laptop. The manager was cool enough to give me credit for the laptop’s price and I in turn got my 80GB PS3. I asked the Geek Squad what notes did the repair facility have about the laptop. He said that it would cost more for them to repair that’s why they are “junking” my laptop. He said more than likely it’s motherboard related.

Lessons Learned:

• Read the Best Buy warranty. They only cover hardware for the most part. If your OS is Windows, expect it to crash but don’t expect your warranty will cover it.
• Acer laptops are garbage.
• If one Best Buy won’t help you, another one will. There are many locations around.

My 320GB hard drive is starting to fill up on my iMac so I decided to get a 1TB hard drive. I knew opening the iMac is going to be a pain. I’ve seen videos from YouTube on how to open the previous plastic models and it looked hard. Nevertheless, I needed to upgrade my hard drive and I want someone else to do it. Besides, I wanted to know how to do it and do it myself. So the first thing I needed to do is look for videos on YouTube. I kept getting the plastic iMac model but kept searching. I found 2 pretty good videos: by lexusnut and by Zenn3k. Those were my starting point.

It took my cousin and I two hours to finally access the motherboard area. I cannot stress enough on how careful you must be. Apple has placed wires in many areas where if you lift something quickly, you may pull it out of place or unplug it – leading to damaging your device. We documented the process and uploaded it on YouTube to help others.

So now I got the new 1TB hard drive installed. How do I get my old system on the new drive? There are 2 ways to do this. The first way is to use Time Machine (if you actually did use it). You can install a fresh copy of Leopard on the new hard drive. After installation, you get an option to use a Time Machine back up to restore. I’ve tried this but since I have over 200GB of data, my iMac ends up sleeping while trying to load the data to restore.

The second option is the image the old hard drive and restore it on the new one. This option took me about a day to complete. What you will need is an external hard drive, your old hard, and the new hard drive. If you image your old drive before installing the new one, you don’t need a second external enclosure. The first thing you’ll do is to boot your computer using the Leopard DVD. Open Disc Utility on the Leopard DVD. Do not do this while booted on the hard drive. It’s possible that it will not work because the drive you are imaging is in use. The external hard drive is where you will save the image file. Once finished, restore the image onto the new hard drive. That’s pretty much a brief summary of what I did.

I did run into some errors while formatting the new hard drive. This post helped me out http://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/290989-disk-utility-problem-erasing-large-external-hard-drive.html.

The image/restore process took most of the day. It may be quicker or longer for you, depending on the size of the data. Make sure you take any necessary precautions before working on your expensive Apple hardware

We are planning on baptizing Aedyn in a few weeks. I was so excited to have him baptized at my old Catholic school, St. Catherine’s. I also had a list of people who I want to be godparents. We attended an introduction class at St. Catherine’s last Sunday so we can prepare for the event.

Wow! So many requirements to be a godparent! Here are some that I remember:

• You must be a Catholic
• You must be active in your parish, at least attending mass
• If married, they must prove they were married in a church
• If single, you must provide proof that you have been baptized, taken first communion, and confirmation
• If single, you must be practicing celibacy

Well, all of my godparents failed and cannot be godparents. On top of those requirements, they have to attend two 3 hour seminars. I told them that many have a busy schedule and some live in another country. I was given two options: have them attend the seminar in their own parish or do a better job picking better godparents. On top of that, the next baptism day is in April, long after Abby’s mom leaves.

I was saddened by this since I know I won’t be having Aedyn baptized there. I started calling other parishes in my area. In order to have him baptized at another parish, I need to get permission from the parish close to my house. Another road block. It’s really ridiculous and discouraging. I kept looking and finally found another church nearby that has rules but isn’t as strict as the others.

We had to take a class but at least it was only 30 minutes. On top of that they do baptisms every Saturdays. We are planning for February 28. So in the end, none of the godparents I chose is qualified. My Mom ended up being Aedyn’s Godmother. My brother, pending his confirmation documents, will be the Godfather. If we cannot provide the documents before the 28th, then he will be a witness. Regardless of what they say, my initial godparents will still attend and hold the candles and be considered Aedyn’s godparents.

I recently picked up a Brother MFC490cw for a good price. I’ve been in the market for a printer with networking capabilities for a couple of weeks now. My existing HP 2600N is nearly out of color toners but has a brand new black toner. I checked out the price for the color toners and figured it’s cheaper to get a new machine rather than purchasing new color toners. I also wouldn’t mind a wireless networking option.

So what I was mainly looking for was networking capabilities. I found the MFC490cw to have what I needed plus more. Here’s my initial impression of the machine after a day of use.

LIKES:

• Draft quality copies are fast.
• Both wire and wireless networking capabilities.
• Scanning capabilities over the network and it works on both Windows and OS X.
• Low cost cartridges (4 total – black, magenta, yellow, cyan).
• Good price for an all-in-one with networking features.
• Small form factor for an all-in-one.
• Once the machine is set up on the network, installation of the printer on your computer is easy.
• Memory card reader can read SDHC.
• USB direct print available.
• USB port is hidden inside, underneath the scanner – it’s a good design idea so that the USB cable doesn’t stick out as much and is cleaner.

DISLIKES:

• After a copy session, there’s a lag for about 5 seconds where you can operate the machine.
• Photo quality isn’t all that great.
• If the 4×6 paper isn’t positioned properly on the paper tray, even if you select 4×6 paper size on the machine’s interface, it will still use the 8×11 paper (this is using the memory card reader and direct print features).
• A little noisy for an inkjet.
• The flatbed scanner seems like it’ll break easy.
• On board interface was a little confusing while trying to have it recognize my WPA enabled network.

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• For PC users, you can send a fax using your computer to create the document. This will save you from printing the document then faxing it. I wish they had it available for OS X but then again, I hardly fax things but still a cool feature to have.
• I printed a photo using Kodak paper. It didn’t come out to well.  The Kodak paper sucks. I got the same results on other printers using the Kodak paper and I got the same crappy results. Lesson: Do not buy/use Kodak paper.
• I had somewhat of a hard time setting up the machine on the network. I am using an Apple router, WPA/WPA2 security, MAC address filtering, and for the printer I assigned it its own IP address. It still wouldn’t pick up the SSID and I have it broadcasting. I finally turned it off and waited a few minutes. I ran the network setup again and this time it found it and I was good to go. I guess power cycling it did the trick.

Even with a good amount of dislikes for the first 24 hours, I still think it’s a decent machine for the price. Brother did not short change OS X users with features. Only thing it didn’t have was the PC fax capability that is available for Windows users. I’ve already seen generic ink cartridges for this machine and since I won’t be printing much photos on here it looks like it’s the route I will take when replace the ink.

Here’s an image I printed out using Kodak photo paper and scanned via wireless network (600×600 dpi and 24 bit color).

Check out Abby’s hair, there’s so much distortion. It seems like it can’t handle black properly. I printed another copy on Brother paper BP71 and the results were better but still cannot compare to what I normally get with my Canon i900D printer. I didn’t expect Brother to be my photo printer replacement anyway. Again, still a good deal for what I paid for and what I’ll be using it for. So if you can get this printer under $90, it’s a good deal for low to medium amount of jobs.

My cousin Von just bought a Macbook last Monday February 2. Apple is giving a $100 rebate with a purchase of a printer. He didn’t want a printer so I bought a Canon Selphy for $100 which made it free after rebate. You can now submit this rebate online at www.apple.com/promo. You will need to enter the ID number at the bottom of the receipt. I submitted the rebate that same night and today I got the rebate in the mail. I didn’t even need to enter any serial number or submit the UPC. It’s fast and convenient. Some companies are  already using this method but even then the rebates take around a month or more. Kudos! to Apple.