or How Tech Professionals can sometimes be knuckleheads too
I have decided to post this article because I recently had a tech issue in my own home that I completely misdiagnosed, and wasted an awful lot of time on. My clients tell me that they love to know that even tech guys get the tech blues, so to speak. This one is for them.
Nesting
An interesting thing about technology is that we find our own favorite combination of hardware and software, and we tend to get nested with it. Comfortable. Resistant to change, or upgrades. And then suddenly 5 years have passed and we find that our beloved setup is completely obsolete; our Internet Explorer 5.2 for the Mac no longer seems to display web content properly. Netscape Explorer has trouble delivering our email. Or (I did actually get this recently) no stores seems to stock Zip disks any longer.
If you can’t recall those products it might be because you are under 30, or it may be that you’re like the other kind of person, whom I will call the cutting edge maniac. This person runs every update they can get their hands on. The cutting edge maniac has every new gadget the moment (and sometimes before) it is released to the public. You know someone like this. You may even be someone like this.
Well, truth be told, I live somewhere in the middle. I used to be a cutting edge maniac, until I realized that being a cutting edge maniac basically meant that I was a beta tester for multiple companies (but mostly for Apple) without getting paid to be a beta tester. So I relaxed my style a bit, and saved a bit of my disposable income in the process.
When Apple released their much-anticipated Apple TV 3.0 update at the end of October, I was very reluctant to download it. My beloved Apple TV was working just fine, thank you very much, and I was not in a huge hurry to update and risk losing my settings, or the ease of use that only a very careful configuration can provide. And so I waited for reports of bugs and issues to surface. After a few days it was clear that this 3.0 software update was a solid one, offering some great new features and a totally redesigned user interface. (read the press release here.)
I-Told-You-So
Well, wouldn’t you know it, I had nothing but issues with it, or so I thought. The Apple TV crashed while it was running the update, which is normal enough, but talk about getting off on the wrong foot! I had to restore to factory defaults, and download and install the update again. Finally, it all took, but I noticed that while the new interface was really, really slick, the entire Apple TV unit simply stopped being responsive. I would click the back or forward button on my little Apple remote, and 3 or sometimes 5 seconds would pass before the menu would advance me to the next option. Uh oh. Not good.
The problems persisted. I had a bear of a time getting the unit to connect to other computers in the house sharing their iTunes libraries. The new interface was painfully slow. I hopped online to find out what was going on.
Tapping the Community for Help
Using Apple’s tech forums, in addition to polling Twitter and Facebook user experiences turned up nothing helpful. For the most part, everyone was LOVING this new update. “Boy,” they would say, “this new update is so fast, and snappy!” Okay, my experience could certainly not be described as “fast” or “snappy.” I even called Apple customer service to find out if they’d received other complaints which echoed mine. They had not. I asked them if perhaps I should consider installing some additional RAM into the unit. They told me politely that doing so was not an option anyway.
Apple’s solution was essentially for me to wipe the Apple TV out completely and start reconfiguring it from scratch. My Apple TV’s 160GB Hard Drive was chuck full of movies and TV shows, and tons more music; all of which had to be erased and re-synced, which took hours and hours and hours. Had I been charging for my time on that project (oh, I’m a professional technician, btw) it would have been an $750 job at least.
Finally, when all of my media was synced back to the Apple TV, all of my playlists, my TV Shows, my Movies; once my YouTube and my Flickr accounts were reconfigured, my MobileMe photos appeared once again under the photos menu, I braced myself for the test.
Still. Painfully. Slow. With a rebel yell, I chucked my cute little white Apple remote across the room, and when it hit the stone tile, the battery chute separated from the remote, spilling the CR 2032 watch battery onto the floor.
An Embarrassing Recollection
As I slowly calmed down, and returned to my Bruce Banner state of being, assisted by several deep breaths and a few choice words, a distant memory came to me fleetingly, like a ghost. Had I not, some weeks ago, once or perhaps even twice, completely ignored a warning alert from the Apple TV itself complaining that the remote battery was low? Or had that perhaps been a dream?
Since I’m exactly the kind of guy who keeps obscure batteries like this one in my office, I was able to replace the battery without any annoying experimental trips to the Radio Shack, and within seconds the sad sorry truth descended upon me like a sack of potatoes.
The remote battery had died. Almost. It had enough life left in it to poorly control the Apple TV. All of this work, all of this time. Internet research. Phone time with Apple customer service. Phone calls to close friends who also own an Apple TV. And it was a dead battery.
Occam’s Razor
Needless to say, once the battery issue was handled, my Apple TV sprang right back to life, and I too am enjoying the (now) updated 3.0.1 software. It’s a great software update, and if you own an Apple TV and haven’t updated yet, I strongly recommend that you do so. I also strongly recommend that you replace the battery in your Apple remote while you’re at it.
In fact, replace all of your batteries, just in case.
