Friday, November 4, 2011

Mac OS Issues Revisited

As the tale ended in October, we were just days away from our conference and my fingers were crossed that the fix we had put into place was going to work (at least for the duration of the conference.) On Thursday afternoon, as I left to set up for the conference we were still operating well.

Friday morning arrived and it wasn't pretty. Doctor arrived and I expected the usual computer hand off, but NOPE! The MacBook had crashed yet again during the evening. So here we are at the 12th hour and it is time to punt.

I pull out my HP and got to the ball rolling. The big trick was downloading the new PowerPoint from my email (27 mg) and a sketchy connection to the internet in our conference room. After a bit of juggling things were set for the morning (or so I thought). There were videos that had been embedded into the presentation, that of course weren't on my computer. If that's all we have fall apart then it will be okay.

The conference was able to get off and running with minimal delay due to the availability of my working PC! It did put a crimp in what I usually do during the conference - providing tech support, sending emails immediately to members during the session so that requested information/materials are there waiting for them before they ever leave. And the biggie - sending emails back to the office so that my post-conference to-do list is waiting for me; it beats the heck out of a list on a little piece of paper.

Fast forward to Monday - Back to the phones to speak with yet another Senior Adviser at Apple, the adviser that whom we had been speaking with wasn't in and had not answered my phone message. Needless to say by this point - the experience with Apple has left a bad taste in my mouth. Hours and hours of trying to resolve the issue with very little progress. Our new Senior Adviser reviewed the information from the case, had me do a couple of things, but then said that the case needed to be referred up to Engineering. Good grief! That could take forever. While we were waiting on a response from Engineering it was suggested that we prepare just in case they sent back a recommendation to reinstall the OS. Okay sound advise.

I backed up the Mac using the built in TimeMachine (very cool piece of software); and just for good measure did the Office for Mac upgrade and backed up again.

No response from Apple before the end of business on Monday. We were left hanging and waiting. The only choice was to just wait on a call or call daily and check to see if they had responded to the adviser. My mission became to call daily to check on the progress of this case and to see if there was any way to poke the engineers into moving faster.

I guess it was Tuesday near the end of the day when I checked back again and finding no reply. It was time to talk with Customer Service - the Doctor was heading out of town on Thursday and we were getting back down to crunch time yet again. Customer service didn't keep me long they moved us up to the Management Division.

I've been dealing with Sebastian now for the past several days - not being in the technical support department there wasn't much he could do except watch and see when the reply came back from engineering. He was very good at returning my daily calls and following up on the status of the case.

Around 3:30 on Thursday I got the call from Sebastian that a reply had come down. He connected me with a new Senior Adviser and off we went to see if we could get the Mac straightened out. After checking on a couple of setting that the engineers wanted to know about the fix was to delete the "Lock" folder from Safari. Something in this folder was screwing with the virtual memory.

Not being able to duplicate the error at will, I attempted to cause it to appear but to no avail. So yet again as I left for the day, the MacBookPro was actually working. I've still got my fingers crossed that it will continue to be working on Monday when the Doctor gets back and continues to work fine from now on out.

The plan is to check back with Sebastian on Tuesday hopefully to close the case for good, but we shall see...