So a couple of weeks ago I decided to take an unused Airport Express and setup an 802.11b-only network at the house, and then switch my Airport Extreme to 802.11n-only on the 5 GHz frequency. I wanted to get a little better WiFi performance for our MacBooks, plus Michelle's MacBook was having troubles connecting to the b/g network so I thought that switching to a different frequency might help.
Making the network changes was easy enough and after re-connecting the laptops to the fast (802.11n) network everything seemed to be working smoothly for the next few days. But then…
The home phone, the plain ol' telephone service (POTS), suddenly lacked a dial tone. I checked to make sure none of the extensions around the house were off the hook; they weren't. So then I took a phone out to the network interface and tried to get a dial tone there. No such luck. Oddly, my uVerse internet service was still working like a champ, so I headed over to http://repair.att.com/ to file a ticket, but before I could finish filling out the form Michelle exclaimed "Hey! The phone's working again!"
I wrote it off to a loose connection at the network interface, but then a couple days later the line was out again, so this time I filed a ticket and was told that it'd be 2-3 days before someone could troubleshoot it. (Geez, that seems like a long time.) Sure enough, by the time AT&T got around to me on Friday the line was working again. They called the house and I told them about the intermittent nature of the problem, so they said they'd send someone out to investigate. That was the last I heard, so I have no idea if they found something or not. At least the line's currently working.
That wasn't my only fun with tech this past week, either. My MacBook seemed to be getting slower, especially when browsing the web with Safari, and on occasion Parallels would peg the CPU until I'd suspend my work VM and then resume it. On a hunch I ran Disk Utility on my hard drive and sure enough it found some problems that it couldn't fix without booting from a different drive.
SuperDuper! to the rescue (again). I use SuperDuper! to make a nightly image of my MacBook's internal hard drive. (This is in addition to using Time Machine to backup to a Drobo at the house, and using Jungle Disk to remotely backup my critical documents.) So, I booted off the external drive, had Disk Utility clean up my internal hard drive, and then for good measure I had DiskWarrior clean the drive up and rebuild the directory.
Booting back off the internal hard drive and things were much snappier, plus the CPU-pounding from Parallels seems to have gone away as well. Yea!
Just one of those weeks, I guess.
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