This week at Mobile Tech Manor #20- how’s your memory?

mobile-tech-manor-large-2Another week has passed working in Mobile Tech Manor and I can’t believe it’s time for another column.  So many things have been going on that it seemed each day this week flew by and was over before I knew it.  I spent far too much time dealing with memory problems and backup problems and I don’t have a solution for either yet.  The CES PR machine is in full swing which is impacting my productivity dealing with it all.  Come on in and I’ll share my week with you.

An old friend has left the building

This week I shipped off the HP 2710p Tablet PC that I sold and that space on my desk looks awfully empty.  I used the heck out of that Tablet and it’s hard to believe it’s gone.  I had to do it though, I have too much gear here at MTM and just don’t have room for it all nor am I able to use it all.  Having good gear sitting around doing nothing drives me batty and it’s better to put it in appreciative hands.  My week has been so crazy that when I packed and shipped the 2710p out I forgot to include the slim dock.  I’ve never done that before and I had to ship it separately the next day.  The new owner is happy with his purchase and was understanding about the dock mishap.  The dock was worth the wait he’ll find.

The next gear to go will likely be the 17-inch MacBook Pro.  I am using the new 13-inch MacBook as both my primary and my mobile system and the Pro is just taking up a lot of desk space.  I should probably go ahead and sell it off as two Macs is one too many.

How’s your memory?

I ended up dealing with the Apple MacBook memory issues I’ve been detailing on jkOnTheRun and spent far too much time on it.  I won’t recap everything here but in a nutshell a simple process of ordering a memory upgrade for the new aluminum MacBook I’m using turned into something unexpected.  While researching my problem with the upgrade online I discovered that quite a few owners of new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are having problems too and there’s a passionate debate going on as to the cause.

I believe the problem is not with the memory sticks rather something in the Macs themselves is causing them to fail when 4 GB of memory is installed.  There are quite a few folks who disagree with me and blame the third party memory sticks but I don’t think that is the cause.  Some owners are having the same issues with Apple-supplied RAM and others are not having problems at all.  I’m not going to rule out the possibility that something in the new Macs makes it hard to get along with memory upgrades but my own testing leads me to believe that’s not the case.

The reason I believe it’s not the memory sticks themselves is simple mathematics.  I have two 1 GB RAM sticks that shipped in my MacBook that work fine.  I now have two 2 GB sticks that fail when used together for a 4 GB memory total.  My testing has shown me that out of the many possible combinations of memory configuration (2 GB, 3 GB, 4 GB total RAM) the only one that fails every time is using both 2 GB sticks.  I can use either 1 GB stick with either 2 GB stick and have no problems.  I can use a 2 GB stick singly with no problems.  It’s only when I put 4 GB of memory in the Mac that it fails.  It’s just simple statistics that all of those combinations work fine and only the one fails.  That tells me it’s not the memory sticks themselves.

I could be wrong about this of course, it’s just my gut feeling.  Apple was rumored to quietly acknowledge this RAM problem and the two firmware updates they released this week had many affected owners hopeful that they would address this problem.  My experience shows that’s not the case as I still get the problem with 4 GB installed after the updates are applied.  Hopefully we’ll get some more definitive information from Apple about this situation, although historically they’ve always been notoriously quiet about problems like this.

Step into my Time Machine

One of the most useful features in OS X is the Time Machine backup that is integrated into the system.  It is a backup system that is drop dead simple and works like it should.  You plug in your external hard drive which configures itself to handle the Time Machine backups and then you forget it.  It has saved my bacon many times when I needed to step back in time and retrieve something before it was modified.  When it works it works perfectly.  The problem sets in when it stops working.

I have been using a Buffalo firewire hard drive for a long time with Time Machine and it’s served me well.  It’s got 500 GB of space and it has worked flawlessly as my automatic backup drive until this week.  It started with a simple error message that told me that the backup couldn’t complete due to an error.  I’ve run diagnostics on the drive which passes with flying colors but Time Machine will no longer work properly.

I wiped and reformatted the Buffalo drive to start over knowing I could do a full backup when erased but that hasn’t done the trick.  Time Machine will no longer backup to the Buffalo without terminating with an error and I haven’t been able to determine the problem.  I haven’t had time to do any online research which is the next step.  The drive works perfectly in every way, the error only occurs in Time Machine so I suspect maybe it doesn’t like a file it is backing up.  That’s just conjecture on my part so I’ll have to see.

This may be a moot point when I sell the MacBook Pro since the Buffalo drive is firewire.  The new MacBook lost the firewire port to the consternation of many so the Buffalo won’t work with it anyway.  I’ll have to think about an alternative drive to use with it.

A typical day at Mobile Tech Manor

I get a lot of email from folks curious how my full-time writing has changed my working methods and schedule so I’ll briefly outline what a typical day is like for me.  My day still starts very early even though I now work at home most of the time.  My wife doesn’t work at home and her alarm goes off each morning at 5 AM.  The failing of alarms IMHO is that they don’t discriminate, it wakes her up and it wakes me up too.

I end up getting up at 5 AM and I get a cup of Joe and sit in the comfortable easy chair in front of the TV (my wife calls it the Man Chair) to catch the first news of the day.  While I’m sitting and sipping I pull out the iPhone 3G and go through my email from the night before which is normally 30 or 40 strong.  The iPhone is a very good platform for doing that and it doesn’t take very long.

I’m usually sitting down at the desk around 6 AM or a little earlier, because I’m not one to just sit in front of the TV for very long.  I go through my remaining email, check the web site to make sure everything is working the way it should and then I jump into Google Reader to catch up on my RSS feed items from overnight.  This is usually at least 300 – 500 items due to all the feeds I follow.  I also spend this time mentally mapping the upcoming day for article writing and generally getting caught up on happenings in the tech world.

After doing this for a while I shower and get dressed as I believe it important to maintain a typical work schedule even though I work at home.  It gives me a better mental attitude and keeps me disciplined for working at home.  This is why I think many home workers have trouble maintaining a consistent work schedule which I find easy to do if I handle working at home with a “real” work schedule.  No working in PJs and robe if you will.

My work day proceeds from that point doing online research and writing articles for the site.  I also contribute to GigaOM and WebWorkerDaily occasionally so there is never a shortage of things to do.  Kevin and I collaborate often during most days using Skype, email and Google Talk.  It’s almost like we’re in adjacent cubicles even though we’re in different time zones.  We work well together and this is an important part of my day as it is easy to feel isolated if you work at home.

I usually have one or two phone conferences each day, often with OEMs that make mobile gear.  I get a lot of briefings about upcoming products and the like which keeps me in the know for providing you readers with good information.  Once a week Kevin, Matt Miller and I record the MobileTechRoundup podcast during the day which is always a high point for me.  We record it over Skype and it’s a blast to do.

I often meet with contacts for lunch or other meetings locally during the week as needed.  This is just like anyone working in an office except my meetings are “off-site”.  These break up the work day without getting out of hand as often happened in my past work life.  I am able to control things so that I don’t have to attend too many meetings which is wonderful.  I usually stop for a coffee and external work session after outside meetings to give me a change of scenery from time to time.  I usually take whatever notebook I am evaluating at the time to see how it works in the real world.

That’s pretty much my typical day.  In the evening I often sit in the Man Chair with the MacBook and watch TV while surfing the web.  This is for fun although I often get inspiration for future articles.  It is interesting to me that I have only started doing this consistently since getting the new MacBook.  I have always been a mouse person and do not like using notebooks in my lap because I have always hated trackpads.  They just don’t work well for me and I find them to be aggravating to use in my lap.

The multi-touch trackpad on the MacBook is the exception to that.  I actually find I am more productive using that trackpad than a mouse and it’s easy to do with the MacBook sitting in my lap in the comfy chair.  This has turned these evening web sessions into things of leisure and not like work and that’s a wonderful thing.

eBook of the week

This week’s book is Patricia Cornwell’s return to the Kay Scarpetta series and is simply titled Scarpetta. It’s taken me a long time to get into this book as Cornwell has decided to make two of the long-time series characters into bad guys.  I found this unsettling which is no doubt her intention and I’ll see where she goes with this as I get further into it.  I love her work in general and the Scarpetta series in particular so I have high hopes for this book.

That’s all folks

This ended up more long-winded than I intended when I set out to write it but that’s the beauty of the Mobile Tech Manor column, at least for me.  It’s a free-form recount of my experiences of the week and the correspondence I get indicates that’s what many find appealing.  That’s it for this week so take care.

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