Saturday, May 17, 2008

One of Life's Lessons

Over a year ago I turned on my Apple PowerBook G4 and was greeted by all sorts of grinding noises and repeated clickings. Never having heard such a racket before, I shut the power off and tried again with the same results. I attempted to start the computer one more time and got the same noises. The hard drive had a catastrophic failure. I was without a computer! Worse, I had several years of documents—mostly journal entries but at least a year and a half of blog entries—on that computer. And let’s not even discuss the number of photographs that were on that 80 GB HD. Back-up? Surely you jest?

Needing a wireless computer, I immediately went out to purchase a new laptop and ended up with a Toshiba Satellite running Vista. (Hey, it came with the damn thing.) As much as I love my Mac, this Toshiba has been doing everything I want. And Vista hasn’t been the nightmare I expected. I had run Windows machines before but this one has all the bells and whistles. I’m pretty happy with it.

I still had the Mac and have an insider working in the Apple Store at the Mall at Short Hills—my daughter, Jess. She asked around about data recovery and came up with a couple of companies that do that sort of work from machines that have suffered far worse than mine. Of course they charge a pretty penny for their services, but I’m thinking of all the photos from several fishing trips to Quebec, one or two trips across the country, and five years worth of miscellaneous family action. How much are they worth? (Seeing as how I didn’t pay for any film or developing, I might be breaking even here.) Plus there are all those journal entries and blog posts. I’m thinking of biting the bullet and boosting the economy of one of these recovery companies. It’s going to cost me between $700 and $1K. Ouch!

Oh, by the way, Jess did have one of her friends take the old HD out of the PowerBook G4 and install a new one so I’ve now got a Windows Vista machine and a Mac PowerBook G4 running Tiger. Sweet!

I will say that the connectivity of the Toshiba is much better than the Aluminum cased PowerBook. Must be the case itself, but the strength of signal with the PowerBook is so dependent upon where I am in the house and even which direction I’m facing that it’s pretty damn annoying. No such problems with the Toshiba. Strong signals are received anywhere in the house and even on the deck.

1 comment:

Rev. Paul said...

I had a similar experience in March of last year. A five-month-old PC with lots of bells & whistles produced a sizzling noise, a small puff of smoke, and slowed to a crawl.

Most of the peripherals stopped responding at the same time. My new PC has fewer bells, but works better. And since the previous hard drive was okay, it's installed in the new one.

But I'm still no fan of Vista.