One Week without my Mac – And counting …

19 March 2008 202 views No Comment

7 March – about 7pm

My Mac goes to sleep … and doesn’t wake anymore. Not matter what I try. P-Ram reset doesn’t help; the hardware test says everything is fine … so why does the MacBook only boot until the Apple logo and then refuse to do anything? I can’t boot from the DVD. That worries me. At the same time I am I oddly relieved: At least the Mac waited until after I finished my final thesis to break … some small comfort.

8 March – 6.30am

I get up early … there’s not use sleeping if all you dream about is your broken MacBook. I kill time until 10am, when I enter the Cyberport shop here in Dresden, my local Apple Service Provider.

The first employee I come across is nice … but doesn’t know sh** about Macs (as he himself admits). After he’s done relaying messages from me to the technician who’s inspecting my Mac and back he leaves me with the advice to try to find someone who owns a Mac to back up my data and then format the hard drive. Duh?! How? If I can’t boot from the OS DVD? And how am I supposed to get a hold of another Mac user when I don’t have access to internet (we remember, my Mac is broken). Graciously he offers that I can use one of the computers in the selling area to surfe the net. When I point out that there are about 10 Macs running and that I could use one of them to backup my data … no, that would not be possible. Jerk.

It’s almost 11am by now and I don’t know what to do. In a sudden stroke of brilliance I go to YouTube and check out how difficult it is to remove the hard drive from my MacBook. The idea: If the hard drive is broken, then a replacement should at least enable me to re-install the system. And then I could figure out how to get my data from the broken drive.Well, it looked easy enough on YouTube, so I ask another employee if I could borrow one of those tiny screw drivers from them so I could replace the hard drive myself with a new drive I’d buy from them (I don’t have the tools at home). She gets me the screw driver and I start to disassemble my Mac right there in the store. I don’t care for the funny looks I get, I am pissed at the service.

When the only thing that remains to do is to remove the hard drive a technician shows up and offers me his help. It’s the same that looked at my Mac a couple minutes ago. I frown at him, telling him that his colleague refused flat out any help. I get an apologetic smile, then he asks me what I want to do.

My plan: Put the old hard drive in an icybox (I brought mine!!), hook it up to one of the Macs in the store and transfer my data to my fire wire drive (which I brought as well!). Then put the hard drive back into my MacBook and format it and clean install Tiger. The technician was delighted, seriously. Seems he doesn’t get customers that often who at least understand the basics of computer technology. So he helps me. I won’t go into more details, other than we did exactly what I had planned to do from the beginning and explained to the first dude.

Transferring my data took about two hours. I sat in front of the Mac we were using the entire time to make sure no other customer would abort the copy process ;) The nice technician even got me a cup of coffee after a while and sat with me for a minute or two. I have to say that he was really, really helpful and took his time to help me. I don’t know why the first couldn’t have done the same. But my faith in the store was restored – I’ve been a customer there for about 2 years now and I will certainly remain a customer. No, the coffee did not bribe me. Though it was really good coffee.

In the end my data was backed up and we put the hard drive back – but no matter what we tried, we couldn’t boot from the DVD. So I had to leave my shiny, little white Mac with them. The technician guessed it might be the logic board; he hoped they’d get the replacement parts within a week. *sigh*

Later that day

I got my old Laptop from my mom.

It runs on Windows. It’s noisy. It doesn’t hook up with my external screen. It can’t read my fire wire drive. It doesn’t seem to be able to read my second external drive either. It doesn’t connect to the internet. My Mac remote control doesn’t work with it.

At least it plays my DVDs. A chance as good as any to get going through season 4 of Babylon 5. The Girl That Knows Everything About B5 will be delighted that at least she won’t spoil me anymore for this season. But watching three or four episodes straight without having the comfort of using my Mac remote control …

9 March

I got the internet running – after finally remembering that these cryptic symbols in the bottom right of the task bar are the firewalls protecting the Windows OS. I turned one firewall off (Sygate) and only left the Windows firewall on. Voila! After just about 3 or 4 hours trying desparately to re-connect with the world (and calling my internet provider twice) I am online again. I feel … wonderful!

Now my second external hard drive is recognized. Granted, it takes about two minutes until it finally shows up, but that’s better than nothing, I guess. Be grateful for the small pleasures of life. At least I can now access my movie library and my music. Gone is the silence!

I keep punching the wrong keyboard shortcuts all the time. Not to mention that my mouse pointer gets a lot of useless exercise because there is just no Exposè¨ on a Windows machine. How frustrating to actually click through open windows manually. *argh*

And I can’t blog. On my Mac I used Rapidweaver, a great blogging tool that I got through a promotion on the internet as a part of a bundle. It makes creating a website really easy and blogging is just delightful, but when there’s no Mac, then there’s no blogging either. Well, in the hope of a soon returning Mac I write down everything in .txt files for later use.

13 March

This work setup is killing me. Since I can’t hook the laptop up to my external monitor I have to crane my neck all the time I am working … needless to say that the pain after remaining 6-8 hours in this position is almost unbearable. Funny. Since I had my Mac I never had such a bad case of aching neck and shoulders. It’s Windows. I knew it!

14 March

That’s it. I’ve had enough. I won’t let an OS stand between me and my blog. As you can read here I switched to WordPress. That enables me to blog online and not be dependent on a certain platform. So, I can finally communicate with the world again and I even found (and adjusted) a template I like.

Still, no Mac. After a week. I hope at least the universe can see the humor in this situation, because I certainly can’t.

The universe puts us into places where we can learn. They are never easy places, but they are right.
Delenn, Babylon 5, »A distant star«

Well, I certainly hope so. And slowly it starts to scare me that JMS has a perfect statement on practically everything life throws at me. I start to wonder if he has some connections to the First Ones.

Okay, the neck pain is back, I’ll retreat to the tons of books waiting to be read … far, far away from this hell machine.

18 March

Just called Cyberport and they said I could pick up my MacBook tomorrow! YEAH! They exchanged the hard drive (thank god I got a backup of my data after all!) and the logic board. I hope it will be ok now … I am so excited and relieved. Currently I am reading books for my final thesis and I have to take notes by hand – I don’t remember when I last wrote more than one page. Tomorrow it’s back to Journler! Yes!

19 March

Finally! I have my MacBook back! And it works! Alas!

After picking my MacBook up tonight I installed Leopard – it went like a charm. I have never before installed a Mac OS, but – as almost all things in the Apple universe – it is astonishingly simple: Insert DVD, reboot and let the Mac attend to itself. About an hour and only two clicks by me later my Mac rebooted with the new OS running. Sweet!

I easily ported my mails, picture libraries and iTunes library from my external drive back to my Mac. My huge iTunes library is still updating, I guess I will have to leave the Mac on through the night, but it doesn’t matter. Access to my mails, my data and my music … I am so happy I can’t even put it into words.

Oh, and of course I learned from my mistakes: There’s a shiny new LaCie Hi-Speed USB 2.0 500GB external hard drive sitting next to me which will hold my SuperDuper and TimeMachine backups.

So, this saga ends here, but I will write about the data migration later on … right now bed calls, it a work day tomorrow after all ;)