i-rant

PROBLEM: Mac freezes up (spinning color wheel) when trying to send a fax. It may freeze up every time you reboot after that.

SOLUTION: If you don’t have an external drive you need to reboot in safe mode – hold down the “s” key while booting – and then open Finder to your hard drive, open your main Library folder and then open your Start Up Items folder. Drag the Virex folder to your desktop. Then reboot. Viola, you can send faxes. Moving forward, you can put it back. Whenever you want to fax take it out and reboot – then send a fax. Or.. better yet – revert back to Virex 7.2.1!

History:
What a waste of time – for an hour and a half last night I racked my brain trying to figure out what went wrong. I was hoping to finally go to be early for once (10:00 but I didn’t make it there until midnight).

I had just scanned in a form I needed to fax to my employer and sent it to the Apple Mac Fax Printer. Then all hell broke loose. The cursor or mouse pointer turned into beautiful spinning color wheel and nothing – the darn mac froze up. I suspected that something was wrong with the fax application or the scanner, never Virex. So I rebooted a few times. Nothing. I then went to backup mode. I keep a second firewire attached to my mac just in case. It has a two partitions – one for use of backup and storage, the other has a complete bootable copy of Mac OS X. I rebooted my mac by holding down the “option” key and selecting this drive. This allowed me to run tests and fix the main drive in the iMac.

But that didn’t work.

I trashed preferences, rebooted, etc. I did check the Apple Support knowledgebase and then the discussions but I wasn’t searching for the right thing. Nothing under “freeze, crash, etc.” then I thought “fax” and I found a terrific post by Brian Crowe1 Computer crash when trying to Fax. Brian saved me sleep (those of you who know me will know I would have stayed up all night trying to get it to work). Virex 7.5 has a cool feature that allows you to start it up when you boot the computer. Well that conflicts with the Fax modem in the macintosh computer and they basically battle to the end… the end of your session. When I removed Virex from my startup folder and rebooted, amazing – it immediately started the modem up dialing and sent the fax! Finder was okay and I moved on. Apple gives you Virex free as part of .Mac but they now only give ou 7.2 – I wish they ahd sent notice to longtime users!

As it turns out – Apple yanked 7.5 from .mac. That article and one from Macworld states:

“NOTE: Due to customer feedback and technical issues currently under investigation, we have temporarily discontinued distribution of Virex 7.5 from McAfee until further notice,” says a message posted to the Apple Discussions message board dedicated to Virex and .Mac usage. “Virex 7.2.1 is available from the Virex pages at www.mac.com and in the Software folder of your iDisk. If you have Virex 7.5 currently installed we recommend you uninstall it now by downloading and double-clicking this Script.”

Now an updated version, 7.5.1, is ready for download.

But it doesn’t address this issue

. The update removes a feature that apparently caused problems in mail scanning – it doesn’t scan anymore. I’m running 7.5.1. Not sure if they know about this problem. I say stick with 7.2.1 or remove the auto startup health check feature.

Jim