You know how I said “every thing that could go wrong did”? Well. It was not even close to being over. Yesterday, right as I’ve finishing re-building my windows machine, my mac decided to lose connectivity with the network.
Great.
So after struggling around for an hour, trying to determine if it was hardware or software, my best guess is that one of the pins in the built in Ethernet port must be bent. (though even after pulling the mother board, and examining it under light, I still can’t see it).
I finally “determined” this by using barclay’s rule of thumb for computers; if something doesn’t work, try forcing it.
And infact, if I put an enormous amount of pressure on the Ethernet plug, I could achieve link with the switch. Unfortunately, applying enourmous force to the cable in the back of the machine while I use it isn’t very feasible.
My thought (and hope) is, rather than send my motherboard in to the mothership, if I can just drop a cheap-o 10/100 NIC in on e of the PCI slots.
My travels eventually landed me at the 1-800-we fix macs PaloAlto location. Being a small, locally owned mac shop, I figured the people would be friendly, or at least somewhat helpful.
But once again, I found out my assumptions were just plain wrong. The gentleman working behind the counter was, infact, a dickhead. I thought my question was pretty good (“my ethernet port crapped out, do you think I can drop this into a G4 and use it in OS X?”) the only response I got from him was (while pointing to a small cardboard box filled with used NIC cards) “you’re on your own, there’s no drivers.” Rummaging through the box, I asked “who do you think would have better support under OS X, NetGear or 3Com?” to which I got no response. Asshole.
I ended up plopping down the $20 for the netgear card. The entire ride home, I had convinced myself that it wouldn’t work, and I would have to send my entire machine into apple, and wait 6 months.
much to my surprise though, when I popped the NIC into my mac, booted it, and opened the network preference pane, I got a nice message saying “your computer has detected a new network interface please click here to configure it”.
No drivers, no issues. And now it works perfectly. Too bad i will never go back to 1-800 we fix macs ever again.