macdavid pro

For all you guys that have purchased an Apple computer with Leopard or Snow Leopard you will have gotten this lovely introduction below. “Uh, duh David! So what?”

Now I’m admitting ignorance here by saying that I naively thought that the music for the OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard intro video was created in-house by Apple. But apparently not because the band Honeycut created this song with their hip-hop infused experimental musical style. And of course I love it.

What do you think of their music? Comment! Click click click!!!

I regret being slow to talk up this product earlier, but have you ever used a library, school, or company computer and wonder why and how after making changes on the computer, at reboot everything is restored to it’s state prior to use? Well, most likely they were running Deep Freeze or the like. But in any case, Deep Freeze provides this very functionality.

Deep Freeze Mac provides a completely non-restrictive working environment where there is no need to be concerned about system damage or corruption; a simple restart eradicates all changes and ensures that the standard system configuration is available at all times. All changes to a computer are temporary for that working session, including installation or removal of software and application preference configuration.

Now I don’t know about you, but this makes perfect sense to me. In fact I don’t want to get into any technical details about this software as I did install the evaluation download and using it is fairly straight forward, if you’re already in the habit of using data preservation tools. But for clarity’s sake, let’s say you bought a brand new shiny Mac, you install all your additional software and customize it’s settings and features to suit you. Now, obviously over time Macs and PCs alike age, wear and get corrupt preferences, system file errors, and the like. In order to to preserve the perfect functioning of you computer you install and selectively “freeze” the operating system (OS) and software areas of your computers hard drive in their present pristine state. So no matter what you do or what happens from when your computer decides to get screwy, it will always be fixable with a simple rebooting of the system. This is flat-out awesome!

As far as IT professionals are concerned, it works perfectly and is tailor-made, as a matter of fact, for large computer environments with a small IT staff and small budgets. It saves on time-effectiveness in terms of not having to restore and re-image several hundred (more or less) computers repeatedly, especially with high computer usage on daily basis. In fact, this personally hits home for me as I have a friend who is also my coworker as our “IT Guy”. We love him and appreciate everything he does because, first he alone is the IT staff, and his daily duties are staggering.

I checked out the list of key features that this software has to offer and it’s no doubt long, so I will only point out some features that I think are worth mentioning here as a selling point for both standard use (single user) and business/education (enterprise) use.

• Guarantees 100% workstation (computer) recovery on restart
• Provides password protection and complete security.
• Protects multiple hard drives and partitions.
• Compatible with Fast User Switching [such as, switching between different user accounts on a Mac]
• Supports SCSI, ATA, SATA, and IDE hard drives [support most hard drives, in other words]
• Offers silent install option for rapid network deployment
• Provides options to deploy on multiple workstations as part of a master image

Finally, Deep Freeze runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Windows Server and Linux), but recently an updated version of Deep Freeze was released along side the launch of Apple Inc’s new OS update, Snow Leopard.

If I were to rate this software on scale of five stars, I’d give this all five.

Please read more, download and even consider trying out the 30-day trial software at Faronics.com

Ms. Contino, you have my deepest apology.

The video card in my MacBook Pro died, and I mean dead! But it wasn’t due to anything out of the ordinary on my behalf. Although, I have been doing a great deal of video editing.

On Tuesday at 3:36am, after spending the whole night editing a lot of video footage and doing a little graphic animation, I finally resigned to take myself to bed. I shut down my laptop as usual and placed it in its carrying case. Later that same morning at about 7:40am I arrived to work and set my computer out and turned it on (black screen). My adrenaline kicks in and my heart literally goes from 0 to 60 in all of a few seconds, so to speak. All I could think was, “Work goshdarnit, work!!” as if shouting, “Don’t you die on me!” Anyway, I put my ear to the machine and could hear it functioning and booting as usual.

In a panic I rushed to a co-worker’s classroom to borrow a dongle to see if maybe my laptop got confused and didn’t come out of the secondary display mode or something–it didn’t work. Neither my laptop screen nor the secondary display showed an image or any sign of illumination. I flew, or so it seemed, to see an on-site technician and he concluded that my video card may have gone kaput. “Kaput” echoed in my mind and I imagined an Apple Genius saying…

Back in my classroom, I plug an ethernet cable into my MacBook and my MacBook Pro and opened Screen Sharing to see if the rest of the computer is, in fact, okay, and it was.

Fast-forward to that evening and I’m on the internet feverishly typing all kinds of combinations of search terms: Black screen, gpu, macbook pro, external display, snow leopard, firmware, you name it. When I was about to quit my searching and give up on finding any other possible fix that didn’t bring me to believe my video card died, I came across this in my final search:

MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues
Last Modified: May 29, 2009
Article: TS2377

In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within three years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

What to look for:

• Distorted or scrambled video on the computer screen
• No video on the computer screen (or external display) even though the computer is on

Specific products affected:

• MacBook Pro 15-inch and 17-inch models with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processors
• MacBook Pro (17-Inch, 2.4GHz)
• MacBook Pro (15-Inch, 2.4/2.2GHz)
• MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

These computers were manufactured between approximately May 2007 and September 2008

One can only imagine that I literally leapt for joy after reading through this article, especially since I have no Apple Protection Plan and my laptop is well beyond it’s 1-year warranty.

I called Apple support, in spite of not having complimentary phone support, and confirmed the authority of the article. Yes, it is an official apple.com article, but I had to be sure. I spoke with two people, the second of which patiently and kindly asked very pertinent questions about my computer’s technical symptoms and agreed that it meets the criteria of the article. A box is being mailed to me and if all my detective work is confirmed, it will be fixed, FREE-OF-CHARGE!

But even after all this I wasn’t absolutely sure that my MacBook Pro is suffering from the symptoms outlined in the article above. So I made sure to look up my computer’s specific make and generation to see if it does have the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M graphics processor. It in fact falls into the category of MacBook Pros that were shipped with the faulty NVIDIA graphics processor. But more importantly, I went back into the Screen Sharing application through my MacBook to try to launch Final Cut, and a window immediately popped up saying to some effect–I can’t remember–that I need to have a video card or processor of some sort to run Final Cut.

For now I am calm and somewhat relieved, but still anxious.

So stay tuned and I’ll keep you updated on what is up with this whole repair and it’s process. *crossing fingers*

Stay synced!