News for Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Many of us have encountered problems with the batteries of the first MacBook Pro. Until now, Apple had agreed to exchange them one by one or more systematically according to their age. But the exchange only happened at the request of the customer.
Now, they have decided to exchange all the batteries of MacBook Pro sold between February and May 2006. These products are those of the A1175 model for MacBook Pro 15" having a part number ending in U7SA, U7SB or U7SC. To obtain a new battery and to return the preceding one, it is necessary to go to be registered on their site with the following address: https://support.apple.com/macbookpro15/batt...ange/index.html
If you bought additional batteries for your MBP, think of checking that their part number is also included, whatever the date of purchase knowing that it could come from an old stock.

Many of us have encountered problems with the batteries of the first MacBook Pro. Until now, Apple had agreed to exchange them one by one or more systematically according to their age.
But the exchange only happened at the request of the customer.
Now, they have decided to exchange all the batteries of MacBook Pro sold between February and May 2006.
These products are those of the A1175 model for MacBook Pro 15" having a part number ending in U7SA, U7SB or U7SC. To obtain a new battery and to return the preceding one, it is necessary to go to be registered on their site with the following address https://support.apple.com/macbookpro15/batteryexchange/index.html
If you bought additional batteries for your MBP, think of checking that their part number is also included, whatever the date of purchase knowing that it could come from an old stock.

If you want to able to use your laptop whenever, it is the bes to keep your battery as good a state as possible. This is especially true for Intel portable CPUs that can have fanciful specs for battery life and sometimes have problems.
A technical note issued by Apple in this regard give the calibration procedure ( http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/9036.html ). Here is the content:

To calibrate the battery:
1 - Connect the MagSafe power connector and recharge the MacBook or MacBook Pro battery until the light of the adapter turns green and the battery icon displayed in the menu bar indicates Loaded.
2 - Let the battery remain fully charged for at least two hours. You can use your computer during that time but you need to leave the power adapter connected.
3 - Disconnect the power adapter while leaving the computer switched on to use the battery as a power source. When the battery is nearly empty, a dialog will warn you.
4 - Continue to use your computer until it goes into sleep mode. Save your work and close all applications just before the battery drains to the point of suspension of the activity.
5 - Turn off the computer or leave it idle for at least five hours.
6 - Plug in the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged. You can continue to use your computer during that time.
Repeat the process of calibration about every two months in order to optimise the performance of the battery. If you use your MacBook or MacBook Pro erratically, it is preferable to recalibrate the battery at least once a month.

You can see the carrying capacity of your battery with many programs, or simply in the power component information system.
Sometimes, after a comprehensive calibration, you will see battery capacity significantly diminished. That is not the process that has caused this, but regular use. Calibration only tests the battery on a full cycle in order to avoid giving you erroneous battery-time-left information.

The first GeForce 8800 GT's for the Mac Pro are starting to be delivered. Here are two important things to do to ensure they work smoothly:
-- Install all updates of EFI if you have missed any. Otherwise, the card will be unstable.
-- On Windows, and before you install the card, install the latest beta drivers from NVidia, v 174.74.
You will find them at the following address.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx? lang = en
Otherwise, Windows will not recognize the card and will display nothing.

As usual, with the introduction of new products, or just to spite AMD, Intel has dropped the price of its processors, or rather some of its processors.
It is indeed only models used on desktop computers, and not products for laptops, nor the Xeon that can be found in the Mac Pro.
Overall, the decline does not directly concern the processors used by Apple which makes updating of the CPU of a Mac Pro or iMac of little interest from a financial point of view.
Intel does not change the prices of the products Apple uses simply because they have no serious competition in these segments. We can only regret this.
This is especially the case this time when some of the reductions are significant. Thus, a Core 2 processor at 2.66 GHz Quad will cost no more than $266. But it does come with any Mac, but it does come with a hackintosh, which makes them economically very attractive.

While Western Digital has "innovated" with its new Velociraptor, it will cease to provide it for the Mac Pro.

Indeed, as shown in photo (credit Tom's Hardware ), the connectors on the drives are not the typical locations for 3.5" products.
However, the disks-mounting tray on the Mac Pro prohibits any non-standard position.
It will certainly be possible to install the Velociraptor in place of the second superdrive, but it will not work with BootCamp and will be especially audible in the that slot.

Buffalo offers a storage server a bit out of the ordinary.

Their NAS innovates by its size through the use of 2.5" disks . Capacity is nonetheless sufficient, the product containing two 500 GB disks that can be configured in RAID 0 or 1.
The price should not be too high, about 450 Euros. It is certainly more than a product based on 3.5" disks , but it is much more silent, not needing a fan.

Fujitsu pre-for May the release of the first 2.5" disk drive able to encrypt data with a 256-bit AES key on the fly, reckoned to be unbreakable.
Everything is managed directly by the hard drive which encodes and decodes the data.
Another feature allows you to erase the encryption key in less than one second ("advanced secure erase feature"). Given the speed of this process, it would be all too easy to irreversibly remove its encryption key, rendering the data unrecoverable.
The performance should match other (non-encrypted) drives, with a capacity of 320 GB spinning at 7200 T / min and with 16 MB of cache.
As long as we can use it in a Mac, it would advantageous to replace Filevault which also secures its data with more ovedrheads, starting with the declining performance of the machine especially when copying.

A small EFI update for the MacBook Pro is available from last night (firmware update 1.5.1, 4.9 MB).
The narrative is exactly the same as the previous 1.5 update dated 15 days ago, with fixes of various problems and offering greater stability, as well as the same ROM versions (the support page of the 1.5 version has been deleted) .

This update fixes various problems and improves the stability of MacBook Pro computers.
Once the program is applied to your Mac, your BootROM version will be as follows:
MBP21.00A5.B08 or MBP31.0070.B07
You can confirm the BootROM version installed on your computer using System Information.

The CD restoration program to reinstall the original firmware moves to version 1.7 (22.5 MB).