2010 Macbook Pro and problems with Yosemite and/or El Capitan

I have had terrible issues with a mid-2010 MBP 15" core i7 laptop. Doing a clean installation of either Yosemite or El Capitan, the installer fails toward the end or crashes on first boot. I have not tried a fresh Mavericks install. However, a restore from a Mavericks time machine backup works perfectly fine. Alternatively, a linux installation also worked well with no crashes.

Quite a few posts suggest it is a log board problem and that Apple would fix it. However, being impatient, I tried my own work around. I noticed that the problem didn't happen if I reduced the RAM from 8GB to 4GB (1 stick of DDR 3 instead of 2.)

A prevailing theory for this failure is that the Nvidia 330M card was crashing the system when it switched from the onboard to the 330M.

A couple of suggested work arounds:

1. disable automatic video switching in power preferences. This will likely consume battery at a faster rate

2. use gfxCardStatus and force it to either onboard or discrete

 What I did was:

1. do a fresh install of El Capitan with only 1 stick of DDR 3 (4GB)

2. fully patched the OS

3. installed gfxcardstatus and forced it to onboard only.

 I haven't had a crash since.

Problems Joining OS X Mavericks to an Active Directory Domain

When joining a mac to an Active Directory domain, you might see this error:

Unable to add server. Node name wasn't found. (2000)

 One of the things that confuses people is that it asks for a clientid. This should be the computer name you want to use on the domain for the mac. Don't try to use your username or "domain admins" or anything like that.



 The other is the "server" field. If you were using LDAP for directory service, you would put in one of the LDAP servers. If you're using Active Directoy, put in the fully qualified domain name of your AD domain.

In this case, the time was too far out of sync on the Mac. Because AD uses Kerberos, the client machine's time must be within a few minutes of the same time as the domain controllers. By default in AD, this is five minutes. The time requirement is necessary as kerberos uses it as an anti-replay control.

Entourage 2004 Crashes After Updates on OS X 10.5.8

I recently set up a new Mac Pro. I installed Office 2004 and copied the user's files over. Entourage started fine, and the user's Exchange mailbox seemed to open correctly.

I patched the installation of office, and Entourage started crashing shortly after launching it. I then removed Office 2004, and reinstalled it. This time, Entourage said that it could not open this version of the database. I patched 10.5.2 to 10.5.8, to no avail.

I tried various fixes other people suggested on the web. In the end, I patched 2004 with the latest patch, killed the Microsoft Database process. Since the user did not keep a PST, I simply moved the user's Entourage data in documents (In a Microsoft folder) to another location - and then reconfigured the entourage client for exchange.

Entourage opened with no issues.