Apple Macs are supposed to be so easy to set-up and use. But when they don’t work they are as confounding as any Windows machine.

I have a Mac Mini, which I love. For the past 4 months had been using it to receive faxes. Then one day (exactly a month ago) it stopped receiving faxes. Of course I didn’t know this until people called up and complained and only after several did so was I sure that it wasn’t something they were doing wrong.

So was the problem with the internal modem (which I don’t use for networking so it sits idle most of the time) or with the fax software (which thankfully is part of the OS)? It’s also possible that it’s receiving the faxes fine but just putting them somewhere other than where I’m looking. Adding to these Apple faxing problems is the fact that the Mac is supposed to email me a PDF copy of every fax I receive but has never done so. This made me think it was a problem with the software.

One potentially useful bit of information was that a month ago I updated the iLife suite of applications, added an iSight camera, and started doing video podcasts. This was also just around the time that my computer stopped accepting faxes. Possible connection? Another clue that the upgrade might be at the root of the problem was that there is a conflict between the new Garageband software and iChat. Since both of these are made by Apple and run on Apple hardware I thought this couldn’t happen. I was wrong. Perhaps in fixing that conflict or something else the ability to fax went out the window.

So I needed to have someone send me a fax so I could see what was happening. However it was already 8:30 pm and couldn’t think of anyone with a fax machine at their home who wouldn’t mind sitting around faxing me while I debugged my computer. So I went on to Google and learned that Windows XP computers can be configured to send faxes. Since my laptop is Windows XP I realized I could have my own faxing testing facility. Oh what joy.

Unfortunately, earlier today I had taken my laptop out to a business meeting and tried to get it onto a corporate LAN. We were unsuccessful despite playing around with several configurations. Tonight, when I fired it up to configure the fax software I couldn’t get on the Internet. So I spent the next hour debugging that. Trying to remember everything we did at the client’s office and everything else. Of course, this was user error involving an Ethernet cable. Once that was corrected I was on the Internet.

I went back to Google to see how to load the Windows fax software onto the laptop. That was surprisingly easy but equally unsurprising it didn’t work. Was this a modem problem (which I don’t use since I go over Ethernet at home) or the newly installed fax software (or perhaps more user error)? Using a combination of Windows help and Windows utilities and a couple of reboots I was finally able to get it to send. I then I had to find a long telephone cable to plug it into a different phone line than the Apple.

I was ready for my first field test and sent a fax to the Apple. The Windows machine went through all of the steps and then gave me a happy little sound indicating a successful faxing. Not so on the Apple side. Now it was time to turn to the documentation. The online documentation was worthless. For faxing it basically said “open the fax preferences, set them the way you want them, hit apply and start faxing.” Whoopeefriggingdoo.

Next I turned to a book I had bought on the Apple OS, but the book was a year old and covered an earlier version of the OS. Unfortunately and oddly, the faxing software appears to be one of the major areas changed since the last revision. It was showing me options that simply do not exist in the new version and pull-down menus that have been altered, moved or obsoleted. I even went on to a few normally reliable Mac tech sites with no avail.

The problem appeared to center around the internal modem which simply would not become enabled. But everything I read was telling me to do things in the software that no longer existed. One fax after another was sent from my Windows machine to the Mac but just not showing up. I then violated pretty much every rule of debugging and started changing all kinds of things at once and not really paying attention to what I was altering–there would be no going back. And it worked. Test fax #8 came through. I honestly can’t say why or what I’ll do if it stops working again but I sent test fax #9 just to make sure that I wasn’t crazy.

I did learn one thing in the year old obsolete Apple book, which is that when the Apple sends out an email with a PDF of the fax it often gets tripped up in ISP spam filters. Isn’t that just convenient?

In the end, I spent 3-4 hours on the project. Certainly time I could have spent doing other things. At least I can now send faxes from my Windows machine if I only knew someone with a fax number who needed something from me.

It’s amazing how much time technology is able to save us!

On a completely unrelated note, here is a picture of a bikini carwash:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 1:26 am by Insider and is filed under How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.