Wednesday, September 16, 2009

All you need is a twinkle of CRC!

After my last post with lots of acronyms flung at us by the MoE you could be excused for wondering what the title of this post is referring to. Well think kiwi - I am talking about the stuff in your tool shed.

A teacher here has been muttering for weeks about her MacBook not playing sound through the internal speakers, even though it plays fine through head phones and other external devices. Like all teachers she needed her laptop too much to hand it in for repairs for an issue that, while extremely irritating, didn't warrant the inconvenience of sending her laptop away to TELA for 10 days for repairs.

This week I took it off her for half an hour to see what had been mucked up in the system settings. Turned out nothing was out of sync; it really was telling her that "selected device has no output controls". Next stop Google and sure enough, it seems to be a common problem. And the geeky advice was endless, and time consuming. Including extremes of reinstalling the system etc.

Didn't take long before I came across a post by some dude who should be an honorary kiwi - he explained in technical terms what was wrong and then said it can be fixed in a jiffy with No.8 wire and CRC. Actually not quite. I presume he is American and offered the US equivalent of CRC - 'JUST a twinkle' and a poke around at 3 o'clock position inside the head phone jack with a tooth pick, and all would be back to normal. Apparently something inside needed to be toggled!

Well, I am not admitting to anything online about a TELA laptop, BUT one very happy teacher was the result. And when the news got around two more laptops appeared with the same problem, requiring the same solution - to the delight of the male staff members who carried out the delicate operation.

(I will provide a link to the webpage with the answer on it - when I find it again)

1 comment:

  1. had the same thing the other day.
    If you look inside the headphone hole if there is a fault it will glow red if this is the issue. Will also say there is something plugged in in the audio input bit in system preferences. The computer thinks something is still plugged in.
    I found plugging in a set of headphones and unplugging them reset it after about the 5th time.

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