Crapple Care

Almost 2 years ago, I bought myself the nicest laptop possible for my birthday.  I hadn't purchased any computer equipment for 5 years, and previously, I had constantly upgraded my desktop machines.  I originally purchased a 17" Dell, but Vista had too many issues (mostly bluetooth), and Dell claimed my video card would have 256MB of RAM and I only got a 128MB card.  I was tired of fighting Dell, and Apple had just released a new Macbook Pro with a 1920x1200 17" screen.  I spent $3000 on the Macbook Pro and a 3 year AppleCare plan.

Today, I took my Macbook Pro to the Apple store in the St. Louis Galleria because the sound died on me.  Up until I got to the Apple store, Apple had an experience that far surpassed Dell.  When my bluetooth didn't work with the mouse I purchased from Dell, I had to spend almost 4 hours on the phone before I could talk with a native-english-speaking high level technical support person.  When my sound died on my Macbook Pro, I waited about 5 minutes to talk to a native-english-speaker.  He seemed more knowledgeable than the Dell tier-1 tech support.  He had me wait another 10 minutes while he asked higher-level technical support about my issue, and when he came back he scheduled me for an appointment at the Apple Store's genius bar for the same night.  So far, so good.

Once, I got to the Apple store, Apple began giving its lead in customer service back to Dell.  I arrived 5 minutes early for my 8pm appointment and waited 20 minutes without explanation.  If Apple is going to make appointments, they should at least explain when they are 15 minutes late.  After a short diagnosis, they notified me that my audio board was probably dead and that it would need to be replaced, which was covered by my Apple Care plan.  The Apple store clerk said it would take 1 week to replace the audio board.  This is total crap.  I could have almost purchased two Dell laptops for what I paid for my Macbook Pro, yet I have to wait almost 7 times as long to get my laptop back from Apple.

When I was dealing with my bluetooth and video card issues with Dell, I had terrific repair experiences.  Even though Dell had terrible phone technical support, their repair service is second to none.  Dell sent an independent contractor to my office and she repaired swapped my bluetooth card the very next day after I called technical support.  It took only two days for Dell to swap out my video card the first time, and only one day the second time.  I never had to leave my office.  The work was all done in front of me, and the repair technician was on time for all her appointments.

Even though Apple makes a vastly superior product that I'm very happy to pay for, they have lost a repeat customer today.  I'll probably buy Dells in the future and just dual-boot ubuntu.

Restrict Time Machine Backup Size

Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) has a great backup facility called Time Machine. You simply specify a disk to hold your backups, and it takes care of everything else. The only problem is that Time Machine will eat all available space on disk. Luckily, I found a very simple solution that limits the size of my Time Machine backups, and preserves my backup history. Check it out!

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071108020121567

Extending an Airport Extreme Base Station Network with a WRT54G

A few weeks ago, I purchased 7" iMate digital picture frame off of woot for about $75. I got it connected to a shared photo library on Windows Media Player 11 on my Windows XP Pro SP3 box. However, the downside was that it didn't connect to my Airport Extreme Base Station in N/G compatibility mode. The only way to get it to work was in 802.11b mode. (This can be done by holding down the 'option' key before selecting the 'modes' combo in the Airport Utility).

This annoyed me fiercely because my MacBook Pro then had very slow network access to my Time Machine backup drive on my AEBS. So, I purchased a Linksys WRT54G because I assumed iMate would have ensured they could connect to one of the most popular home wifi hubs. Luckily, I assumed correctly. However, now I had a problem: how do I hook up my Airport Extreme Base Station and my Linksys WRT54G so that all computers connected to them could see each other? This meant that I could not run the WRT54G as a NAT like I had always done in the past. Instead, I needed to use it as an ethernet bridge.

I did a lot of googling last night, and most people are daisy-chaining their WRT54G with one as a wifi client so it could extend their existing network. This is not what I wanted to do. I want separate 802.11N and 802.11B/G segments for maximum speed for my MacBook Pro.

I tried and failed to get the WRT54G to work as a router using the advnaced routing tab. Then, I found suggestions to simply attach the AEBS to the WRT54G's LAN port instead of its WAN port, and then disable DHCP in the WRT54G. This worked like a charm! Now, all my devices can see each other, and I have two separate wireless segments. My MacBook Pro's network is now screaming fast.

The downside is that I can't seem to access the WRT54G's admin page unless its connected to the AEBS through its WAN port. This is really annoying, and I hope someone can tell me how best to fix it.