Ker-CHUNK.
Apologies for the lite blogging of late… My computer hardware woes continue. Boudicca froze up on me a few days ago so I did a hard reboot. Within seconds loud clicking noises were emitting from the hard drive. Crap. I couldn’t get her to boot up properly, not even off the OS X CD. In rode the Snook to the rescue. He downloaded and burned some sort of “Linux rescue disk” and was able to boot me up from that. He then proceeded to back all my crap up over the network. (I’m the worst backer-upper ever.) Then he performed some computer voodoo that resuscitated my OS from the dead. Apparently the problem only occurs when the hard drive starts up, which is why I was getting the problem on booting up and waking from sleep. So now I’ve got it set to never let the hard drive sleep. As I understand it though, it’s only a matter of time before the drive dies altogether. I’m strangely ambivalent. It’s been a good run. The iBook has lasted nearly three years, so my Apple Care (if I had it) would be running out soon anyway. I’ve given some serious thought to having the Snook fit me out with a kickass Linux machine, but there are still a few things holding me back. Despite all the problems and frustrations, there are still so many things on the Mac that “just work.” I like how easy it is to transfer my photos and make movies and scan pictures. I know I can do all those things in Linux, but it wouldn’t be so seamless. Not to mention the fact that we’d have to do some serious tinkering to get my iPod – which is still going strong – to work with it. So it looks like a new Mac is in my future. I wonder if the new iMacs will be headless…? Hmmm.