BigDiver

Today I took my Macbook Air for repair at a local Apple store – broken hinge and antenna cover. Although the Air has been out of warranty for some time they said they would replace the whole top part – not jut the hinge – for free, because it was a known issue!

The Apple “Genius” guy told me that the Air would be ready in 3 to 5 days, but a couple of hours later I got a call from him saying that the computer had been fixed and was ready to be picked up.

The great service relieved a lot of the frustration of seeing the broken hinge. So if the same thing happens to you, don’t buy the hinges on eBay (some are selling for $300). Take your Macbook to an Apple store. They’ll do a professional repair and most likely it will be free.

Great job Apple!

After a HDD crash on my Macbook Air I decided to buy a solid state HD, for speed. I bought a RunDisk 128Gb, and the speed difference is astounding. The one down side was battery life.

I was expecting to have more speed and better battery by using the SSD, but that was not the case. I used to get about 4 hours out of my battery on the Air and after installing the SSD disk i now get about 2 hours. That was 50% drop!

The good news was that after playing with CoolBook and Undervolting to fix the overheating problem on the Air. I reduced the “on battery” voltage of the CPU and now I am back to having 4 hours of work time. Amazing!

So far I have noticed a huge difference in the temperature of the Air. After playing with CoolBook for a bit, getting a few system hangs and one kernel panic, i found the following settings to be stable:

Adapter:
1200 MHz 0.9000 V
1400 MHz 0.9875 V
1600 MHz 0.9875 V

Battery
800 MHz 0.9000 V
1200 MHz 0.9750 V

Throttling: High
Temp Limit: 85 C

Video plays with no hiccups and so far temperature has not climbed over 70C.

It has been reported many times that the Macbook Air overheats to the point of burning your legs. On the positive side we could possibly use it on the next corporate BBQ to get some ribs grilled to perfection.

It has been my experience that the fastest way to get the Air burning is to have it play some HD video. After a few minutes the playback starts hanging, the CPU goes to 100%, and that is the end of the movie.

I knew that undervolting could be a solution but I did not know how to use it on the Mac
Undervolting is basically a process to lower the CPU voltage by software in order to improve battery consumption and lower operating temperatures.

Due to the manufacturing processes each CPU has slightly different voltage tolerances. Chip manufacturers, instead of optimizing de lowest voltage possible for each individual CPU, they basically set it to a know stable configuration, that some times is far from optimal.

The higher the voltage the higher the power dissipation, i.e. heat generated by the CPU. This has nothing to do with speed. Do not confuse voltage with frequency and clock cycles. Lowering the voltage will not make your computer run slower, or damage your CPU in any way. It will save battery and cool it down.
The idea is to lower the CPU voltage while keeping the frequency at its maximum.

The “risk” of lowering the CPU voltage is instability, again you will not, repeat not, damage the CPU. At a certain point the CPU will be unstable and cause a kernel panic in the operating system. So all you need to to is find the lower possible voltage that still keeps the CPU stable and you have a winning configuration.

After searching the Web for days on end I found a cool (no pun intended) small utility called CoolBook that allows you to do just that, play with your voltage settings in order to find the optimal lowest voltage for your CPU to run.

I have been playing with CoolBook for a day or so and I will report back my findings soon.

What has been your experience with Mac Overheating problems?

After fighting with Snow Leopard for a couple of months on my Mac Book Air, and experiencing two serious data corruption problems, I have officially given up on Snow Leopard.

Here is the summary of my experience with Snow Leopard.

1. Snow Leopard came out. I upgraded both my Macs (iMAC, and MacBook Air)
2. iMac works with a few quirks, but after the first update from Apple things are stable and all seems to be working. A few applications needed to be updated, but no major issues.
3. MacBook Air upgrade did not work initially as documented in a previous post.
4. Got everything to work but it was so very slooooow…. NONE of the “faster” claims by Apple verified.
5. MacBook crawling, it got so bad that I decided to do a clean install. So I formated my HDD and installed SL from scratch.
6. Same thing, slow, slow, slow….
7. Found some fixes as documented in another post. This did work, especially the Terminal fix.
8. The MacBook Air was not hibernating or sleeping properly, was hanging constantly and finally I suffered data corruption when the laptop ran out of battery while stuck, and not going to sleep after I closed it and stowed it.
9. Tried to recode HDD but all data recovery tools complained an said they could not recover the data.
10. Second reinstallation, same thing happened after three weeks

Fed up, went back to Leopard, all is working to perfection…

I have to say that my experience upgrading both my Macs to Snow Leopard has been mixed. It was easy as clicking the Install button on the iMac, it was a nightmare on the Macbook Air.

First I used the Remote CD installation process, started the Macbook Air, mounted the remote CD from the iMac and proceeded to run the “Install Mac OSX.app”. After agreeing to the license agreement the installation utility told me that the disk did not have enough free space. Despite the fact that the disk had 21Gb of free space!

After some digging I found out that PGP Whole Disk Encryption is not compatible with Snow Leopard, and PGP advised users to decrypt the disk before upgrading.

So I decrypted the disk and restarted the Installation process, only to find out a new error! Damn.

The install app now told me that the Machintosh HD, the only disk, in my Macbook Air, was not a bootable disk and could not install to it. I did some more web searching and some people reported the error to related to the partition format, not being GUID.

I checked with Disk Util and it was indeed GUID. So using Disk Util I added a new partition with 1Gb, using the free space, this procedure rewrote the new partition table to disk and after I was able to finally install Snow Leopard.
When Snow Leopard was installed I used Disk Util again to delete the 1Gb partition and recover the disk space.

If Disk Utility gives you disk verification errors, you need to repair those before resizing your partitions. If you repair the disk multiple times and it still gives you the same errors then you should run the Remote Install Mac OS X application on another Mac. If you only have a Windows as a second computer check this the “How to use Remote Disc” article on Apple’s support site.

Boot your MacBook Air directly into the Snow Leopard CD. Just start the Air and hold the option key until you see the list of disks you have to boot from. If the Remote Install Mac OS X application is running on your other computer the Snow Leopard will show up here.

Have you had Snow Leopard upgrade issues?