Thursday, May 21, 2015

System Status Report on Yosemite 10.10.3 for Thursday

The Apple Store turned up all-green on hardware tests yesterday.  There is a Big King diagnostic tool for the back room boys (yah, of course girls too as Apple is about as Love to Buy the World a Coke as any place you will ever see) and that's the one we want.

The Apple Store recommendation is I should take the iMac back with a virgin copy of Yosemite 10.10.3.  This will work but it's excruciatingly slow because the first step beyond that is to do nothing to the machine beyond using Bluetooth to connect a trackpad and a keyboard.  Then do nothing for twenty-four hours.  If it stays up for twenty-four hours then it meets the minimum standard for reliability as booting it once a day isn't going to ruin my life and I'll probably shut it down when not in use anyway.

Previously it had been my preference to leave the system running around the clock and I still believe that's the most effective way to keep a live system breathing.  Nevertheless, that has to be balanced with how much time it spends idle and it needs to be shut down if that time is what you consider excessive relative to the power the computer uses.  I don't want any devices other than the screen to 'sleep' but when they're significantly idle, I want them down altogether.


Once it passes that basic test, it needs to be repeated for each component as it's added to the system and this is the part that's painful.  As it stands right now, I have no confidence it will pass the initial box-stock test.  Therefore I will talk with the Apple Store prior to bringing it back here and request please, please take this to the back room and stress bust it.  Hardware problems must be eliminated altogether as a possible problem source or this loop goes forever.

There won't be anything much else to report today as either I lose and do it the long way or they will keep the machine and set it afire to see what crawls out of it.  The latter is preferred as systems programmers always prefer that approach:  let's burn something.

There must be a solid foundation before going forward so there it sits.  News later and now into the mist.


Note:  I cannot bring anything else up as that results in network peek-a-boo when I know the system will be shut back down again the next day.  This situation needs to be fixed once and fixed right.  I don't want to do it, I don't want to talk about it, and you don't want to hear about it so get it done and out of the game.

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