Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Software
Things I learned over the weekend
It was one of those slow weekends. A good time, I thought, to clean up some odds and ends on my to-do list. Often, my list involves things relating to my computers, and this weekend was no exception.Item #1. Install Windows 7 RC1 using VMWare. I didn't have a super urgent reason for doing so, but the time seemed right. I went to the Windows 7 download site, followed the instructions and the download never started. Just an animated thingy. I assumed the Microsoft Servers were busy, so just let it go. A few minutes passed. The thingy kept spinning. Finally, after an hour I said the hell with it. Oh, I wasn't just staring at the screen for an hour. I DID have other things to do.
I tried again later in the day. I thought, well, maybe this download is really popular, but it has been out for a few days, and certainly Microsoft has plenty of bandwidth. I tried a few tests downloads of other things, and everything was peachy.
Just for the heck of it, I tried downloading the RC with Firefox. Blam! It started right away. I'm sure other people know this, but a quick Google didn't give me any obvious joy. For whatever reason, Safari just won't connect. A subtle message from MS? Or just one of those things? Anyway, save yourself some frustration, and use Firefox. It just works. (Note: there were some comments about this in Steve's Windows 7 post)
Item #2. Back up one of my big hard drives. It's a LaCie 500 GB that has a lot of photos I've taken over the years. Strangely, I could not see the disk on my desktop. I have 3 firewire drives on my desktop Mac, and only 2 were there. The one that was missing was the first one in the chain. It was, of course, the one I wanted to back up. The power light was on, and all the downstream drives were functioning fine. The Apple profiler could not see the drive. Disk tools couldn't see it either. It was time for my trusty copy of Disk Warrior. It had saved me many times before. It scanned and saw nothing. Nada. Zilch. It did nicely offer to rebuild my other drives, but that wasn't too helpful in my situation.
I mentioned my problem to a friend, and he said it was surely my power supply. No way, I said, as the blue light was glowing on the missing drive, and everything attached to it was working. Well, I was pretty desperate and swapped power supplies with another LaCie. The drive came to life, and popped onto the desktop. I did some more Googling and found a lot of people with bum power supplies on LaCie drives. They may or may not be worse than other brands, but there was a lot of negative chatter about LaCie power supplies. I ordered a new one directly from LaCie, and the problem will be solved. (Hmmm. They have a whole page dedicated to replacement power supplies.)
OK, my to-do list is shorter, and my knowledge base is a bit larger. I also learned something I should have learned a long time ago. The best answers are not always the most direct or obvious.
Good luck with your projects, and by the way. Windows 7 works quite well under VMWare. Glad I didn't try to install it on that LaCie.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
scott Newton said 4:12PM on 5-11-2009
Reminds me of a recent exchange I had with M$:
I had received an email offer to renew my Microsoft Technet subscription (which I use for cross-platform testing via VMWare). The email invited to click through to complete the renewal.
I did so several times, but I could not get to the offer which was presented in the email.
So I spoke with someone in their support dept and was told that Safari would not work to make this online purchase, that I needed to use (are you ready?)
"Internet Explorer 6 or better"
They seemed baffled when I explained that Safari 3 was better than IE 6, but to no avail. I ended up making the renewal by phone.
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oliver hart said 4:37PM on 5-11-2009
I got the same spinning blue thing and thought I was losing my mind. The spinning circle should be a middle finger. Or at least say browser not supported.
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Andre said 4:38PM on 5-11-2009
It's funny how everything else I try on Safari works just fine. It's almost as if someone tried to make it not work.
Another strange one... web sites created with iWeb seem to work fine on every browser except the new IE8. Turning on Compatibility Mode gets around it, so someone knows what the problem is.
Now they want me to install something called Silverlight. Apparently it will let my browser do what it already does today with Flash on non-Microsoft sites.
I just remembered why I switched to Mac :)
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Andrew Timson said 7:38PM on 5-11-2009
Compatibility Mode makes IE8 fake itself to work like IE6. It's almost certainly iWeb's fault for not serving compliant pages to IE, instead feeding it IE6-hacked ones.
Nixta said 4:43PM on 5-11-2009
I got the spinning blue thing too, but pasted that URL into Firefox (and logged on to Live again) to get the download. When I clicked the download, Firefox stalled with the download perpetually "Starting...". So I pasted the download URL into Safari and it began downloading straight away.
It looked like MS Live authentication stalled. Whether that's tied in with Safari's handling of things, I don't know.
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charliemtorres said 4:44PM on 5-11-2009
I unfortunately have a hotmail account that I keep just because I have an Xbox 360.
Anyways, I cannot navigate Hotmail while on my MacBook using Safari. Why MS? Just let it go...there's enough love to go around.
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Chris said 4:47PM on 5-11-2009
LaCie drives are famous for their power supply issues. Never, ever again will I buy a drive from the hobby shop called LaCie. I've lost 7 drives over the years, all LaCie. Run, don't walk away from them. Nice looking cases, crappy drives and power supplies.
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Karl-Franz said 4:51PM on 5-11-2009
I too had the spinny thing in Safari when attempting to download the Win 7 RC. I tried Firefox but had the same problem. A few minutes later I tried Safari again and it did work, although it opened up its own Java-based download manager instead of Safari's.
Regarding LaCie: I have bought 3 replacement power supplies over the years to fix dying drives. It seems like an annual ritual. This year, when one of them failed again, I called their tech support about it. A very helpful support staff member told me that they have now switched power supply vendors and the problem should be fixed. He sent me a free replacement power supply for each of my 3 LaCie Big Disk drives. So far, they are holding up well.
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Luxu said 4:56PM on 5-11-2009
i had the same problem a while ago and my friend had the same problem through linux (it was a few months ago not on rc) wen i tried from a windows pc at work it worked well :/ i dont think its against safari, its more against mac in general
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Jayson said 4:57PM on 5-11-2009
Item #3: Star Trek is awesome!!!!!!!1!!!
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Yaphi said 5:02PM on 5-11-2009
Safari 4 beta worked fine for me. Probably an issue with the Sun Download Manager?
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Ryan said 5:08PM on 5-11-2009
I had a similar problem downloading the windows 7 public beta. Safari would only download about 30% of the file then tell me it was done downloading. Tried it in firefox and had no problems
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henri said 5:08PM on 5-11-2009
@Yaphi: It's akamai's downloader, thing is garbage, Downloading via BT currently.
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Dbs143 said 5:19PM on 5-11-2009
you know,
this was a great post. it was simple, to the point, and fun to read (not being sarcastic at all).
thanks mel!
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GLaDOS said 7:51PM on 5-11-2009
i totally agree, TUAW should do more of these considerin i can read other blogs for fast apple news these types of post is why i read TUAW
orksnork said 5:23PM on 5-11-2009
Didn't read the comments to see if it was posted, but I had a similar problem on my XP machine at work downloading W7RC...
I was using Chrome. Must be a Webkit render issue.
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johnbiker2000 said 5:33PM on 5-11-2009
I had the same endless waiting with Safari 4 beta. It worked fine with Firefox for me, though.
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Cog said 5:35PM on 5-11-2009
The first words out my mouth were are you f%$^ing kidding me? Three months ago I spent days fighting with my LaCie drive, as it mounted intermittently and generally misbehaved. Nothing helped , including Diskwarrior and as far as I could tell, there was no solution on the net. I finally gave up, managed to salvage some important files and bought a new drive.
Well, thanks to you I just plugged in a power supply from another LaCie and my 1 terabyte LaCie is back from the dead.
Many, many thanks.
Cog
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Nick said 5:42PM on 5-11-2009
I too was unable to download Windows 7 RC1 with Safari 4 Beta, but was able to immediately with Firefox. However, that is as far as I have gotten with it. I have burned two ISOs now, both the 64-bit and 32-bit, and Boot Camp refuses to install it. Every time I go to install, it shuts down OS X, opens a new screen, spins up the disc for a second, then ejects it and restarts OS X. It's beyond annoying. So far googling is getting me nowhere.
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Nathan said 8:45PM on 5-11-2009
Are the image burned correctly?
Do you know how to burn an ISO? I'm not trying to be insulting here, but I have seen many instances where people just copy the .iso file to a disc instead of using an image burning program, so I am just checking.