My mac wants to be alone.

[Andy Hamilton]

Just lately my computer seems to have gone all grumpy on me. My external 60gb ezquest cobra hard drive only gets read after turning it on and off frequently. Eventualy my mac will see it is there and let me access my files, quite annoying especially as I lost the whole website for a while.

Also my printer has become temprimental, I have put in a refilled colour ink cartridge which worked perfectly for a while. But it seems to be incombatable according to the HP info thing. (It is a hewlet packard deskjet 3820). When I take out the cartridge and put it back in it works sometimes, but this is often after a very frustrating hour or so.

Any comments on either problem will be most greatfully recieved.
Cheers

[shiney]

Grrrr my broadband modem is having a funny five minutes too. Everytime I boot up the pc, it needs the plug pulling from the back of it and then putting back in, the wire wiggling and hey presto it's friendly again!

Have you got a problem with something overheating somewhere in that box of tricks maybe? Have you a set of backup files for the website, somewhere other than your pc? I have burnt the whole lot to disc and my website man has another set saved. Losing files is just the biggest pain in the neck.

Refilling ink cartridges is a pain too. I have heard that sometimes the printers won't work properly. I get my cartridges from www.ink2u.co.uk, based in Taunton. You can send the empty ones back in a pre-paid envelope and get 50p or so off your next purchase. They do original or refilled ones. Good service as well. Maybe worth a try.

[alcina]

Have you reset the PRAM and the NVRAM?

PRAM reset (same as it has been since god was a boy) - power up and press p-r-cmd-opt until it chimes three times.

NVRAM - boot into Open Firmware (I'm assuming you have something newer than a Beige G3) by holding down o-f-cmd-opt
You get to a screen that has an ok> prompt.
Type: init-nvram
Press enter - if it says it doesn't recognise the command type: reset-nvram It all depends on which version of Open Firmware you have.
Then type: set-defaults
Enter
Then type: reset-all
Enter
Machine will say "flashing yada yada" and reboot.

Resetting the NVRAM is good for finding firewire ports again!

Have you Diskwarriored the machine? Have you reset permissions?

Refilled cartridges vary tremendously. Personally I find the whole ink jet cartidge thing a complete scam - the ink is more expensive the top notch champagne!

Alcina

[Andy Hamilton]

Hoorah a fellow mac user

Will try all the pram stuff and no have not used disk warrior recently.

As for the ink cartridge, I bought it back to the place where it was refilled and bingo gave me a new one, works perfectly.

There was something in the press last year saying that indeed printer ink is the most expensive liquid - more exensive than space shuttle fuel. I have been thinking of looking into getting a refilling machine myself, if they are reasonalby enough priced.

[alcina]

Hoorah a fellow mac user

Mac support/repair is what I do for a living - though I'm moving into sysadmin rather than hardware support. 8) Battling with what will/won't work in 10.4 at the moment. I've just discovered this afternoon that installing 10.4 will overwrite your httpd.conf file and your motd. The httpd.conf is slightly more important, but I was not best pleased about the motd file! I've had to rewrite my whole apache config file again. Not happy. Not happy at all. Still trying to find out what else has been overwritten....

I mention all this because you mentioned having your website on your mac. If your mac is hosting it or you use your mac to host a test version of it, installing 10.4 will break it (broke mine - no VirtualHosts set, no php modules loaded!). Because of the httpd.conf overwrite you'll also find that php will fail. Backup your /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file and your /etc/motd file to a completely different area! I actually reinstalled php just to be safe. Oh and if you use X Windows that too all gets overwritten - I had to reconfigure sawfish all over again! Backup backup backup. Utter swines How can they justify overwriting these files without backing them up first!? Mutter...mumble...

Alcina