MacBook Lament

In order to celebrate getting his CCIE (and to ease his own conscience about buying an Xbox Elite for himself) Eric bought me a MacBook. That was about a month ago, and in the last few weeks I've been thinking about doing an "Ode to my MacBook" post. Just when I was about to start writing it though, my MacBook let me down and crashed. So my ode has become a lament.

I was just about to go to bed last Thursday night and decided to double-check a soap recipe for the morning when my browser window froze. I tried to force quit - nothing. Finally I had no choice but to manually shut down my Mac and restart. There was an ominous clicking sound and when I turned it back on, all I got was a gray screen. No Apple logo, no startup page - just dreary, gray nothingness. I tried booting from the installation disk (which was still in my kitchen, since I just used it a few weeks ago) and even that didn't work. I knew this could not be good news.

In the morning I called tech support and after half an hour on the phone we had figured out that it was a big enough problem that it would require a genius to solve it. Good thing Apple has Geniuses in their stores! Shew! I made an appointment and on Saturday Eric and I showed up at the Genius Bar (complete with bar stools) in the Apple Store near us. Our Genius was wearing a red bandana, had three earrings and a pointy goatee. He figured out quickly that something had gone seriously wrong, and my hard drive wouldn't mount. My month old hard drive. There was nothing to be done but replace it completely, so I lost everything that was on it - which actually wasn't that much, since it was so new. All the pictures I had on it were backed up on Shutterfly, so I only ended up losing a couple of songs and the third season of The Office, which I had downloaded on iTunes and is on my iPod. If I'm careful not to automatically sync everything, I won't lose that. And if I do lose it, I'll have an excuse to buy the DVDs and get all the bonus features. So my old hard drive is gone, and the Genius installed a new one right there.

So I have learned to always back up - even if you're using a Mac, which you bought because they are supposed to be secure and safe and not prone to freak hard drive failures. I still love my MacBook, but it's going to take a while for me to trust it again - that has to be earned!