The powerbook is now in pieces. Or more precisely, he "finished disassembling" it and will proceed to put it back together when the part comes in. The part would be the left blower to keep the insides cool, and the ETA is tomorrow. On Wednesday Ted stopped by and we (although my part was mostly watching) took it apart and tried to track it down. After booting it up, starting a loop to peg the CPU, and then playing three movies in quicktime simultaneously as well as plugging it in, we were able to get the fan to come on and it made a clicking/scratching sound. Taking the top off really makes those things cool better. :) The sound changes when you press on it, so we're thinking that the presure from the top screwed down, combined with resonance from the metal casing and the weird noises from the fan is the source of the annoying clicks/beeps/squeaks that once one notices cannot be ignored. We'll find out in a couple days when I get it back though. Last week was more miscellaneous cleanup stuff. We got to the point where the first step became "is this something on our end or do we send it back", which is good in a way because it means the stuff that's really bustificated is probably fixed, but bad because it means we wore out/confused the Help Desk and they don't know what to send where anymore. I think I need to send along more detailed info ahead of time on the next fixes. Towards the end of the week I also started changing and reconfiguring things. I eliminated one of the domains (although even though it disappeared from the list on DCs, the clients still show it - I'll have to figure out what machine needs a swift kick to the power cable to loose that cache entry), which is good because that's one fewer thing to cause problems/confusion. Friday night I also made it a native 2003 domain, and recreated the entire DNS structure for the forest. No, I didn't do the DNS stuff by hand, I'm not that crazy. Basically I set up a new AD integrated zone which means we have multi-master updates available so stuff is more stable if things are down. I also set up scavenging to clean up old workstation records since those tend to build up way too much. Then it was a matter of moving over DCs one by one and forcing DNS registration, and once the forest was built to a reasonable and almost complete level bump up the old zone serial number and allow rollover into the client DNS system. There are a few oddities/old domain records which are finally gone, which is nice. The scavenging plus building everything possible dynamically from scratch means that I now know there's a reason for everything being there and nothing I didn't specifically specify will end up stuck in there. For those worrying, yes I did test domain logins after I made all the changes. I want a quiet Monday too. :) Saturday was setting up wireless at my grandma's place. That included 802.11b (appropriately locked down), wireless video, and wireless phone. Everything seems to be peacefully coexisting, which is pretty cool as I think the video is 2.4Ghz too. After that was attempting to fix my dad's computer too, and getting Qdoba for the entire family. Most people liked it, which was good. Today was sitting around, poking with my dad's machine more (looks like something with the registry so another rebuild), and a visit to Southdale to see chyron off. I ended up watching Trainspotting which is an interesting movie. Not sure how much I liked it yet, I'll have to let it sink in a bit I think. Since the mall visit today I've been using my linux machine again, and it's just serving to frustrate me as to what I'm missing on the mac. I've decided that much of the OS X UI looks nice but has issues. This machine, despite being in PIII 700Mhz mode and having only 512MB RAM, responds much quicker than the G4 1.5 with 1GB RAM. And It's dealing with 1600x1200 on a lower end video card than than the one driving the 1280x854 screen. I'm having a hard time believing it's the hardware, so that leaves the OS. Darwin/mach is pretty quick, so that leaves Aqua. I had turned off many things (Onyx is a cool but not nearly useful enough tool), but I think I need to figure out how to shut off more animations. People say that the windows open plenty fast on the mac, but when I've been used to the new window being completely drawn by the time my hand is off the mouse button... Plus the dropped keys when typing fast is annoying. I thought I was just really fatfingering stuff, but when another coworker commented about it while I was trying to log into a machine, I figured it out. Mostly happens on passwords, I think a little above the 5 keys/sec point (it'll miss like 1-2 characters over the course of a few seconds). When you know it well enough to type faster, but can't see what's actually making it into the machine... Oh well, enough OS X rants for now. I have around 18 hours in the car (minus whatever I end up driving) coming up in the next week to try and make my computer usable like a real OS. :)