While I had some spare time today, I went to the Adobe Roadshow 2009 at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre, Sydney. It was quite interesting to see the demos of some of the applications from their new CS4 suite. A lot of work and thought seemed to have been put into applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash (that I sat through). Tighter integration and UI improvements seem to be the name of the game, but in Flash I noticed that they had included some of the tools that were more closely associated with other programs such as (mainly) AfterEffects. Looking forward to running some of the demos myself.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Deep Sleep gives Macbook some much-needed sleep
I have been somewhat troubled by the inability of my MacBook running 10.4.11 version of OS X to hibernate properly (suspend to disk). It all started when I upgraded the RAM from the standard 1GB to the 4GB it is now. After the upgrade, it could not reliably wake up from hibernation without a crash occuring after using some memory-intensive programs such as some Adobe software and Aptana and such, which would require a forced reboot. Having lived with this issue for sometime (started shutting down instead of hibernating), I decided to try to Google some answers.
After trawling through some forums and blog discussions, I found a Dashboard widget called Deep Sleep which is easy to use (one click) and seems to reliably put the notebook to sleep without wake up crashes (that’s what happens to me when waking up early morning). So if your macbook is a little insomniac like mine, then do give it a try.
Service with a happy ending
On one hot January night while I was trying to write a statement about some art project that I was working on, I just fell asleep on the lounge. I was trying to type this statement up on my trusty little HP Mini Note 2133 that was runing Ubuntu 8.10. Due to extreme tiredness and heat, I just felt that I could not go on typing or even thinking so I closed the laptop expecting it to spin down and hibernate while I just headed straight to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, the notebook was in an extremely hot state, it was more than the normal warmth you get from running a notebook for a few hours. When I tried to switch it on, it was not responding as normal. There was no HP logo at startup even though all the normal lights were on. The notebook was pretty much dead and did not respond to anything.
After leaving it alone for about a week (actually I just forgot all about it for a few days), I decided to contact HP since the notebook was still under warranty. After the usual menu selections I spoke to an operator who suggested that I plugged the notebook to the power (already done), to see which lights were on (already done) and then to plug it into an external monitor (already tried that too). He suggested that it might need a mainboard replacement (thought so).
The operator then rang me back and suggested that he could guide me over the phone to try to reseat the RAM module (unfortunately, already tried and I even tried another module of the same specification–1GB DDR2 667Mhz). He then said that I would get a phone call from an engineer who would visit me with a new mainboard.
Three days later, the engineer showed up and replaced the motherboard in all under 20 minutes. I was very impressed with the service and wish all notebook manufacturers provided the same level of service. Good work HP! Shame on you Toshiba! Shame on you Apple!