In the comments Tonio Loewald stated that

Laptop failure rates of 20-30% over three years certainly seem pretty accurate based on my experience (and that’s how Ars Technica looked at it), so the “value for money” equation for extended warranties pretty much comes down to 0.15 x purchase cost (since your laptop has about a 15% chance of failing due to reliability issues after its standard warranty expires).

This would mean that AppleCare on a $1699 MacBook Pro is worth about $255. Apple charges $349 for this coverage, but it also includes 3 years (well, 33 extra months) of phone support. You can decide if that’s worth it for you, but it’s certainly not unreasonable.

Looking a bit closer, the report claims a 31% total failure rate over 3 years, with 10.6% from accidental damage and 20.4% from hardware malfunctions. You might be able to get accidental damage covered under warranty, especially if the company uses 3rd-party vendors (I’ve been told by Dell techs “I don’t care if you poured a can of Coke in the machine”), but such failures are generally specifically excluded from coverage, so lets go with the 20.4%. The paper shows that the 1-year hardware malfunction rate is 4.7%, so that leaves a 15.7% failure rate over the 2 out-of-warranty years. This agrees quite well with Tonio’s claim.

The other term in the equation is more suspect. The Square Trade report doesn’t give any details on the failures making up that 20.4%, but it seems likely that almost all are single-component failures, which would not require replacing the whole system. The actual value equation is more like:

value = 0.16 * average repair cost.

Of the 7 laptops I’ve owned over the past 15 years I’ve had one screen, one hard drive, one trackpad, one motherboard, and one power supply fail. None of the repairs were significantly over $300, and none of the machines were under $1000 new (most were quite a bit more!). A bit of lazy Googling seems to back this sub-$300 average repair bill, if someone has current, reliable numbers on this I’d love to see them.

Even if we’re generous (pessimistic?) and double the repair bill, that extended warranty has an expected value of about $95. And since we’re on a 3-year cycle here, what happens if the failure happens in the 35th month? Are you going to pay for the repair or just buy that replacement system a month early?

The bottom line is that, like most kinds of insurance, the vendor on an extended warranty is assuming a risk in exchange for profit. The average consumer isn’t going to get back anywhere near the cost of the coverage. Even those needing one typical repair are going to break even at best. You might be able to get additional value out of extras like battery replacement, but in general extended warranties don’t make a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, the DSi does not allow you to enter a passphrase, you have to enter the 64 digit hexadecimal key. If your router doesn’t show the key (mine doesn’t), you can calculate it using the WPA PSK Generator from the authors of Wireshark (a great network analysis tool).

If you have access to a Linux system with the wpa_supplicant tools installed, you can do this at the command line using:

wpa_passphrase ssid passphrase

1. Connect your iPhone or iPod Touch to a computer with iTunes installed.
2. Launch iTunes and switch to the Applications section of the Library
   
3. If this is your first install of an app
   1. Save the provisioning file to your desktop…
      
   2. and drag it into iTunes
      
4. Save the application to your desktop…
   
5. and drag it into iTunes
   
6. Select your to your iPhone or iPod in the Device section in the left column of iTunes; then go to the Applications tab.
   

Make sure you’ve either selected “All Applications” or that the checkbox next to the new app is selected.

7. Click “Sync”
8. Enjoy!

CPU vs GPU from Juan Diez on Vimeo.

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"

These seemed to be silently ignored.

After an emerge --sync; emerge -u world last night, the vmware devices started getting IDs following the highest-numbered eth device. These rules would be added to 70-persistent-net.rules, and on the next boot the devices would move up even higher, causing all network device config settings to be ignored.

I noticed that the new rules added to 70-persistent-net.rules were of the form:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"

(ATTRS was replaced with ATTR), which just means the match is done on the specific node rather than checking all of the parents.

After a lot of painful attempts to fix this, I finally found the problem. Apparently the DRIVERS key is unset at this point for the vmxnet driver. I removed that test, so that I have:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"

which now works.

Phew!

Of course, the new machine came with Vista, which actually runs fairly well (the quad-core 2.4 GHz processor may have something to do with that… or it could be the 3 GB of RAM or the SATA RAID hard disks…). I put the drive from the old system in and started moving things over, but I ran into problems trying to delete some old directory trees (particularly the old Cygwin install) due to permission problems.

A bit of poking around on Google led to a useful tip on Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog: Windows Vista Secret #11: Deleting the Undeletable. The short version is:

    takeown /f directory /r /d y
    icacls directory /grant administrators:F /T

Works like a charm. Just use a command prompt with administrator privileges.

Installation was pretty painless, the ASUS A8N-SLI mobo has support for 4 SATA drives, and my Antec Sonata case has SATA power connectors (which, interestingly, are about twice the size of the data cable), so I plugged it in, turned the SATA interface on in the BIOS (I tend to disable things I’m not using) and booted into Windows.

XP recognized the new hardware, asked for the nForce4 SATA drivers (the latest of which were already sitting on the IDE drive) and installed them. A quick click through the WD install software and the drive was formatted. I started the WD drive migration tool on the expectedly long process of copying 140 or so GB of data from the old drive to the new and headed to bed. I was a bit suspicious of the tool’s ability to copy everything over while XP was running, but I figured I’d give it a shot and headed to bed.

In the morning the copy was done, so I shut down Windows, removed the IDE drive, and powered back up. The BIOS screens flashed by, then I saw it: “Error Loading Operating System”. Apparently my drive, which was perfectly accessible from a fully booted XP install, was not bootable.

To make a (very) long story short, I tried a lot of things to fix this. I started by using Acronis True Image to reimage the drive without XP running. No luck, so off to Google.

I saw lots of recommendations to do a repair install, which requires a driver floppy to access the SATA drives in this system. Since I don’t have a floppy (and the ultra-modern XP operating system doesn’t seem to think this is possible) I couldn’t use my boot media, so I downloaded a fresh copy of nLite and bundled the drivers into a new, custom install CD (along with SP2, which was already on the system). I tried using the recovery console from this CD (which could access the drive just fine), but no amount of “fixboot” type stuff helped. I tried a repair install and still couldn’t boot. Finally I reformatted the disk and did a new install. It still would not boot.

Then I found a post that recommended changing the disk access mode setting in the BIOS from “Auto” to “Large” (the only other setting…). This changed the boot error message, so I started another clean XP install. This time I made it through the reboot and into the GUI installer, so I shut down, reinstalled the IDE drive, and reimaged (with True Image). Everything is now working beautifully!

This only took about 14 hours for someone with 20+ years of computer experience and a degree in the field. No wonder people pay Best Buy to do this crap!