Disk Inserted

Look up at the sky — is it falling? It sure seems as if that kind of doom is imminent, at least if this whole iPhone 4 pre-order situation is any indication of future tragedy. We’ve received hundreds of tips this morning from friends near and far that iPhone 4 pre-orders aren’t going through, though a few of us here on staff were able to get a confirmation during the wee hours of the morning. From AT&T in the US to O2 over in the UK, it seems that just about everyone ambling to get their name on a future iPhone 4 is experiencing a great deal of frustration. AT&T’s servers seem to be completely hosed here in America, and since Apple’s own online order process has to ping those to check on your contract status, neither option is… um, working. Those who decided to line up at a local store are facing similar issues; employees aren’t even able to fully process pre-orders in store due to systems being overwhelmed, and no one seems to exactly know when things will be back to normal. And you thought the most enraging part of this was the inability to select a white model. Let us know how your experience has been in the poll and comments below, won’t you?

Update: So, it sounds like Best Buy is taking pre-orders (even for white units), but chances are remarkably high that you’re not actually getting in any line. Still, it’s a working option for the moment. In other news, the Apple Store app is seeming to allow iPhone 4 orders, but it looks as if they’re reserving off-contract phones (read: full price ones), so we’d only recommend this avenue if you enjoy things like “arguing about contract dates” and “yelling at brick walls.” We’re guessing you’ll be doing both on the 24th.

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iPhone 4 pre-orderers overwhelm servers, world on the brink of ending originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This isn’t the first keyboard assembly snafu we’ve seen and it certainly won’t be the last. But once again it’s time to point and laugh at Apple after its new Core i7-equipped MacBook Pro was accidentally fitted with three command keys in Japan. Funny, knowing Steve Jobs you’d think he’d opt for more ctrl.

MacBook Pro i7 in a ‘command’ performance originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 May 2010 05:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can’t officially confirm this yet but, We’re hearing from all over that a bad McAfee for Windows XP update is causing computers worldwide to shut down. Apparently DAT update 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself and sets off a chain of uncontrolled restarts and loss of networking functionality. Yeah, wild — Twitter is basically going nuts, and McAfee’s support site appears to be down. There are some fixes floating around out there, but it may be too late — the final tally of borked PCs today may reach into the millions. We’ve already heard anecdotally that an Intel facility has been affected, as well as Dish Network call centers, and we’re sure there are going to be more reports as the day wears on.

Update: McAfee just sent us a statement — they’ve pulled the update from their corporate download servers, and consumers shouldn’t be affected.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers

Ouch — that might be the understatement of the year. We’ve definitely hearing this affects SP2 as well, we’ll keep looking for more.

Update 2: The anecdotal numbers keep rolling in, and they’re not small — 30,000 machines are knocked out here, 60,000 there. Given that the only fixes right now involve techs spending time with each affected machine individually, things could get seriously messy. We’ll keep you updated if you keep us updated, okay?

Update 3: Here’s an official McAfee fix, although like we said, it requires tech to hit each machine in person. We’ll see what the story is for bigger institutions with tens of thousands of seats.

Update 4: We’re told the official fix only helps those who haven’t been hit with the bug yet, so there’s obviously still issues to be sorted out. [Thanks, Tyler.]

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Developing…

Botched McAfee update shutting down corporate XP machines worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Getting a Blue Screen of Death is never a good time, but the infamous error screen is actually trying to help—seriously! This handy guide can make some sense of what’s killing your computer’s stability.

PC enthusiast site Maximum PC put together a guide covering how to read the crash screens and logs. When you know what’s wrong, the guide also leads you through common causes, troubleshooting those common causes, and, for the final layer, diving into the Microsoft knowledge base to get fine-grained on those BSOD annoyances. If you’ve been wrestling with a Blue Screen of Death lately, check out the guide and see if you can find a solution before throwing in the towel and rebuilding your system.

(Update: This guide is now available in PDF format which can be downloaded here)

(Courtesy of Maximum PC)