For some time now, the laptop has been in the habit of shutting itself off without warning when the battery gets low. The meter will say it still has 20 or 30 minutes, and then ZAP: blackness. Various support technicians have assured me that this is normal behavior with Intel processors (!) and/or that they might ship me a replacement battery if I’ll please jump through these sixteen hoops, since it’s out of warranty. So far I haven’t had time to jump through the hoops, which involve things like running down the battery and letting it sit for six hours.
If I’m running MAMP when the battery shuts down, bad things occur. Tonight, the database for Sekrit Projekt #2 got fried. What’s worse, Time Machine doesn’t show any backups more recent than April 20, even though the laptop’s been plugged in to the drive for days at a time since then. Worse still, restoring config files and reinstalling MAMP hasn’t worked this time; all sites relying on MySQL dbs are now claiming that they can’t establish connections.
Apple’s stuff normally works so well. Right now I want to kick a puppy. Probably wiser to just call it a night, especially since we don’t have a dog.
Oh, I’m so sorry, sweetie. *hugs*
(the guy who sold me my latest computer refused to sell me something with Intel Inside.)
Damn you internet!!! Twice now my reply has been eaten. GRR!
Back that shit up, yo! (LOL)
I keep all my files backed up on a portable hard drive and back those up to another drive daily. I’m totally paranoid after a server crashed a few months back and we lost a bunch of stuff because the RAID died. It was a good lesson learned.
I miss you!
Bummer. I’ve gotta call BS on the “normal behavior for Intel chips” line though. Sounds like they don’t want to own up to a bad battery or a problem with the power management system.
Good luck with recovery. Maybe you’ll be struck by a brilliant piece of insight today that will let you recover the fried database.
I can live with the hosed database; there wasn’t that much in it that had changed since April 20, since I’ve been busy with other projects. Some data loss, yeah, but not catastrophic.
What I really want to know is why Time Machine isn’t backing up correctly, and why MAMP is now refusing to work.
… and yeah, I called BS on that “normal behavior” thing to, to his face, and he stuck with the line.
Ditto on the BS on Intel chips.
I’m not sure how MacOS calculates the time remaining, but Windows seems to report based on current activity. If I have a full battery and I’m copying something off a DVD so that the battery is powering both the DVD and hard drive, it might read 90 minutes. As soon as the copy is done it might read 4 hours. So if my battery said 30 minutes and then I hit the hard drive pretty hard, that might drop real quick.
Ouch! My CrapBook™ does the auto hard shut-down when it thinks the battery is low, too. Thankfully, my 2 PowerPC machines have given me minimal problems. Intel inside makes me want to kick puppies, too.
Apple is edging closer and closer to my hate list.