It was an unexpected death, but one that made a lot of sense afterwards given that my computer had been operating at less that its optimum capacity for a couple of months now. Almost every day I was dealing with the spinning rainbow wheel of death, which would cause everything to freeze. The only solution to this was to constantly force re-start the whole system. This is very annoying and unless I'd been saving every application I was using, often meant I would lose all of my open tabs and data.
The data from my machine was unrecoverable. That's the worst part of a hard drive malfunction. Did I have everything backed up? Well, what do you think? No! I did have the most important things backed up, though. Over the summer I had uploaded all of my photos to Picasa web albums, so precious had the ones of Max become. Thank god for that. Of course all of the content of this blog is safely uploaded to Blogger. I can't imagine how devastated I would be if I'd been recording this journey only in Word documents or something. Also, my thesis is backed up in a few different places, which was also a blessing.
I have lost all of my music, bookmarks, and other random content, however.
Let this be a lesson to us all! I have now downloaded the Google Drive, and have upgraded my operating system to OSX Lion, so that I can access Apple's iCloud and have all of my data backed up all of the time!
So that's the bad news. The good news is that I was able to get a new hard drive without having to replace my entire computer, and I got to spend a fair bit of time in the Mac-lover's paradise known as the Apple Store, where many pretty, happy, shiny things exist to make you believe that anything is possible, if only you had the right equipment.
The store at Doncaster Westfield is a wonderland, albeit filled with far too many customers at any given time. I had a headache after I'd left from the sheer noise from the store, but I could understand why everyone gets so excited while they are in there. I could easily imagine how your credit card could just slide out of your wallet and over the counter to procure the latest shiny gadget. In my case this would be an Ipad.
We briefly toyed with the idea of replacing my laptop with an iPad, given that we have two other computers in the house already. The main thing that stopped us from doing this was the storage capacity of the iPad (which is very poor if you are using it as your main device, and not just as an addition to your computer) and because I use my computer mostly for word processing. You can get Pages for iPad, and you can attach a wireless keyboard to it, but I think it would still end up being inferior for that kind of work. Perhaps, if we'd had to pay for a brand new computer, we might have more carefully considered it, but as it only cost a few hundred dollars to get a new hard drive, we decided I would stick with Mr Macbook until we were unable to get any more life out of him at all.
We briefly toyed with the idea of replacing my laptop with an iPad, given that we have two other computers in the house already. The main thing that stopped us from doing this was the storage capacity of the iPad (which is very poor if you are using it as your main device, and not just as an addition to your computer) and because I use my computer mostly for word processing. You can get Pages for iPad, and you can attach a wireless keyboard to it, but I think it would still end up being inferior for that kind of work. Perhaps, if we'd had to pay for a brand new computer, we might have more carefully considered it, but as it only cost a few hundred dollars to get a new hard drive, we decided I would stick with Mr Macbook until we were unable to get any more life out of him at all.
Getting assistance at the Mac Store is fantastically easy. You can make an appointment with a Genius by using the Apple app on your iPhone, and when you arrive the app automatically checks you in so they know you are there waiting. I found all the Genius nerds to be incredibly friendly and knowledgeable. They were mostly boys and mostly had lovely sensitive boys names like Nick and Daniel, and they all had lovely soft hair and fuzz-free faces. Did I pay far too much attention to what the Genius nerds looked like? Well, yes. But given that I ended up with Leslie I must be a bit partial to the cult of the nerd, so that should be understandable.
There were quite a number of toddlers in the store who were going to town on the demonstrator iPads. They knew a thing or two about what they were doing, which was quite incredible to watch. Toddlers aren't supposed to have much in the way of fine motor skills but these ones were pinching and swiping and tapping like professionals.
I did manage to leave the store without making any extra, impulse purchases, but there's so much I could have bought! And so many nice young boys I could have taken out for lunch!
You'll be pleased to know that my laptop, with its new hard drive, is running like a dream. No delays, no freezes, just plain sailing computing, which is how a Mac should be!
There were quite a number of toddlers in the store who were going to town on the demonstrator iPads. They knew a thing or two about what they were doing, which was quite incredible to watch. Toddlers aren't supposed to have much in the way of fine motor skills but these ones were pinching and swiping and tapping like professionals.
I did manage to leave the store without making any extra, impulse purchases, but there's so much I could have bought! And so many nice young boys I could have taken out for lunch!
You'll be pleased to know that my laptop, with its new hard drive, is running like a dream. No delays, no freezes, just plain sailing computing, which is how a Mac should be!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for visiting my blog. Please feel free to share your thoughts or feelings, big or small, with me here.