03 April 2010

let me explain

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Back when first I was going to become a computer-owning person, right when part of the Bay Bridge had just fallen into the bay, I was determined, determined, to be a sensible person, in sync with the rest of the legal professionals out there, not bucking the evil tide, functioning as yer basic respectable sort, someone whose PC could smoothly interact with those of my peers.

Everyone who knew me, except one very doggedly pragmatic, commonsensical and businesslike Yalie, said, "Oh, nooooo! You are a Mac sort of person. You just CAN'T do that!"

I did it.

Thus I learned in intricate detail the hell people go through to be computer-savvy citizens, functioning in the digital age.

You fucking fools.

For a very long time, the affordability thing was the big excuse. It was NEVER good enough, but now it's REALLY not good enough. I was not a destitute person back then. I am now. Still, I starved myself, stayed home, skipped movie rentals and the odd treat to a restaurant dinner, for five months to have my new Mac when my beloved old one blew up.

Turns out that three monster brown-outs, right in a stomach-churning row, at my mother's house, when my machine was plugged directly into the wall, toasted my power source... and a couple weeks later it went down. When I went to Radio Shack to see about one of those battery gizzies that won't let brown-outs reach your computer, the guy there freaked about what kind of monster-good power source had to be in my computer to have survived that even for a minute. There's still a chance I can get to a Mac genius to give it a new power source....

That's the ONLY thing that ever went wrong with my G5 iMac in the five years I had it. It would STILL be rocking if not for that apocalyptic electricity bullshit happening when I'd been too careless for a few days.

I know that replacing it turned into a nightmare for me, but Apple bent over backward to ease my misery, and they very seriously made good on the ordeal. I ended up with something quite more powerful and functional than I'd ordered to begin with, plus a free iPod Shuffle... and, bip-bam... I'm now working on a Mac that has not given me one moment of grief. I plugged it in and kazaaaaaaaart.

Everything looks a thousand percent better on a Mac, everything. It feels elegant, even when it's set up in the barn. It's not like having a small washing machine or a Cuisinart sitting on your desk. It actually makes yer desk look prettier. It's fun. It's intuitive. You can work your heart out on it and it never lets you down. I know there are guys out there adept at making their Macs crash, but that has to be a guy thing, that knack for finding the very least perceptible weakness and exploiting it and exploiting it and exploiting it until something finally blows, because a Mac has NEVER crashed on me, NEVER lost my stuff, NEVER refused to submit to the precise way I want it to act in front of me, and ALWAYS provided me with a way to get what I want, do what I want, with everything I do on it.

Snow Leopard came with a few minor glitches, and even those were correcting themselves instanter, and the updates to fix them have come with due dispatch. I know there are some scarily tolerant humans out there, who daily endure veritable Perseids of glitches and hassles and mistakes and insults and do-overs and faux pas and breakdowns without complaint, but for those of us who value every micron of serenity, there just can't possibly be anything better than life with a Mac. If this makes me a Moonie, so be it.
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5 comments:

  1. That's easy for you to say as I'm sitting here fighting with the computer on the cart I use for recording and re-formatting another which will replace it.

    The replacement is my old work one with a replacement hard drive. It's faster than the old one which is the only reason I considered the swap.

    As I was backing up the drivers from the work one to the cart one prior to changing the cart one crashed. Something creamed the boot sector. I had to reformat the drive and reinstall windows. During the setup it again crashed the boot sector. So I took it off the cart and installed the replacement one. Now I'm going through the joy of downloading drivers!

    Whoopee!

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  2. To protect your computers from power company problems buy a battery back up it cleans the power up and stops surgess. I lost a laptop to the problem and were I live in the central valley we see them all the time. I caught a sale at best buy on apc system, plug it in and your off the main grid of dirty power you can even train it to turn your computer off if your not around during a power outage.

    Sorry to hear about your problems Bb2

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  3. Bb2 ... If feasible, the next time you reformatt and install windows, after istalling all drivers and programs , tweaking the new install exactly how you want it, go out and buy a second hard drive (must be exactly the same as your current HD).

    Then download and install a free trial cloning software program (I use Acronis free trial version).

    http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

    Then slave the new hardrive on to your computer, format it from within windows, then use the disk copy option from the cloning software to copy your fresh install of windows to the slave hardrive. Take the slave drive out and put it on the shelf and you will never have to intall windows again :p.

    The only time you will have to update the backup drive is if you install any significant pieces of hardware to the system requireing system drivers.

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  4. Apple's not anything like they used to be before they got rich. How great were they?
    One afternoon 15 years ago my Macintosh Quadra 800 went haywire. On its own, the printer started printing line after line of closely-spaced jibberish. I shut down, restarted, and during the restart process it did it again. I phoned support who said it sounded like a hardware problem, they couldn't do anything over the phone.
    The next morning a tech showed up, installed a new power supply and "just in case it got damaged," a new logic board. I used that Mac for seven more trouble free years.
    Ahhh, for the good old days.

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  5. That was back when you lived nearer to their techs. Way out in the boondocks that action is not so feasible. It may still be what they do nearer into metropolitan areas. They put me with a tech guy in Canada over the phone, direct line, to determine if it was hardware doing it, and he did NOT put me through shit or play games. The minute we got to where he couldn't rule out hardware, he got me a brand new and fucking much fancier replacement.

    I think what happened was the bean counters got too powerful while STEVE JOBS was too ill to prevent it. When he got back up, the bullshit that was starting to happen went away.

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