As I type this, my MacBook Pro is sitting at Carbon Computing in east end Toronto waiting to be repaired. The reason being that I was having problems with SuperDuper backing up. What it was doing was failing and giving a cryptic “input/output” error. Not really helpful in terms of giving me a root cause. But I decided to try a backup with another backup program called Carbon Copy Cloner which did give me a meaningful error message. It thought that the hard drive in my MacBook Pro was failing. That was unsettling. When I ran Disk Utility, it said everything was fine. But I wasn’t buying it. So I ran a SMART testing utility and got this:
Clearly the drive is dying. This is the second drive to fail in the last few months as I have previously written about. That really does not speak well of Apple’s product quality. Here’s something else about Apple does not impress me. The earliest that I could get into the Apple Store, any Apple Store, to see a Genius was 9 days from now. That does little to inspire confidence in Apple’s ability to support their customers. So I went to Carbon Computing which is an Apple Reseller with Apple Authorized Service. I was told it was going to be about a week before they could look at it. But at least they were willing to see me right away. Not ideal, but at least it is in the queue. And it’s better than the Apple Store which from prior experience isn’t open to fitting people in on the fly. I’ll let you know how this reseller performs.
What really bothers me is that the rock solid reliability that used to be associated with Apple products appears to be disappearing. I shouldn’t have to replace two hard drives in such a short amount of time. I would love to hear what Apple would have to say on that. But of course they won’t as they are not that sort of company. Too bad. Because I am not impressed by this at all.
Updates as they come.
Another Update To The Rogers Lag Spike Issue
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on October 18, 2014 by itnerdI found a solution to the lag spike issue that was reported to me and I did some investigation on. In the case of my customer, his lag spikes were caused by his Rogers supplied modem.
Here’s how I figured it out.
The customer was using the modem to serve up Internet access for his home. So I plugged my MacBook Pro into it via Ethernet and pulled up the page that allowed me to see the modem stats page. Then I had him play Team Fortress 2 and I waited. The stats looked good for the most part. But every once in a while they would fall outside the range that is optimal and that is when the issue would manifest. That implied a line issue or a modem issue. I then phoned Rogers and though it took a while because the tech at the other end of the phone was clearly not used to this sort of advanced troubleshooting, the tech finally suggested that we take the modem to a Rogers store to exchange it. We did that and so far he hasn’t had a re-occurrence. Though we continue to monitor the situation.
Now, I have a feeling that this is not the only cause of this issue. Googling this issue shows a variety of causes and a long history of this issue going back years. Clearly Rogers has a long standing problem with lag spikes that they need to address. I say that because a Rogers customer had to hire someone like me to solve their problem. That doesn’t reflect well on Rogers.
As for troubleshooting this issue in my condo, I have put that on the back burner until my MacBook Pro comes back from being repaired. Expect another update when that happens.
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