Last Sunday night I was using my MacBook, it seemed fine, and then on Monday morning I found it wouldn’t turn on. I thought the battery was dead, but no, that wasn’t it: it wouldn’t start even with the AC adapter connected and the battery LEDs showing some charge. I tried the Apple-prescribed fixes and none worked. The only one I didn’t try was “schedule a service appointment with either an Apple Retail Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider”. I was pretty sure whatever their diagnosis, it was going to cost more money to fix than it was worth putting into a four year old laptop.
So… there’s a new Mac on the way, an iMac. (I have another MacBook, at work, and the only desktop computer currently at our house is a 7 year old iMac on my son’s desk.) I considered moving to a Linux (only) setup, but decided I’d need a fair amount of transition time during which I’d be scrounging time from Heather on her MacBook Pro; not good. And I considered a used Mac but decided in the long run a new one was a better purchase. And I considered a Mac Mini but decided the performance hit wouldn’t be worth the not-so-large price difference, factoring in the need to get a display, keyboard, and mouse. (MacConnection is offering iMacs at a discount of $150, after a $100 rebate.) And I considered a Windows machine. Ha ha ha! Kidding.
This will be… well, I’ve lost track, what… Mac SE, LC III (I think), PowerBook 100, G3 Desktop, iMac G4, MacBook Core 2, MacBook Pro, iMac Core 2 Duo… I think that’s all of them… our eighth Mac. Not counting the two I’ve had at work.
But what about my hard drive? No problem! I was using CrashPlan for backups. (I’d just bought an external drive to start using Time Machine with, but hadn’t gotten that going yet.) Except… turns out I wasn’t. I’d been having some strange problems earlier in the summer and finally fixed them by re-installing the OS. Apparently in so doing I stopped CrashPlan from working and didn’t notice. So my last backup was from sometime in June. Moral: You don’t have a good backup plan if it stops working and you don’t notice.
Good thing it was only a power problem and not a hard disk crash, right? Last night I pulled out the drive and installed it in an external drive enclosure. And then I backed it up. So we’re good.
iMac should arrive Monday.
Doctroidal dissertations 