Monday morning when I got to the office my venerable old
G4 PowerBook crashed. I knew why too. I plugged into the network without disconnecting from the wireless first.

I know what you're thinking, surely a Macintosh running the very latest version of OS X (10.5.3) can handle something as simple as this. But the machine was having issues. Five years of intense work in PhotoShop, Illustrator, Flash, and recently Final Cut. Not to mention hundreds of blog posts and blog comments and hours of blog reading. (Seriously don't mention it. The computer belongs to the company and some of that was done on their time too!)

But this was no big deal. It happened every time I forgot to turn of Airport. One forced restart then shut down the wireless, then one gentle by the book restart usually did the trick and I was on my way.

Not this time though. The forced restart went normally I shut of the airport card and restarted again. The first app I launched bounced in the dock for a solid minute then stopped without launching. Nothing else I clicked on after that did anything.

Another forced restart that didn't even manage to load the finder. Then another and another.

Booted of the Leopard install disk and ran Disk Utility. Found out I had an Invalid Key length.

Pulled out my trusty copy of the never fail Disk Warrior, and well, never say never. It did nothing.

Jumped on a co-workers system and started Googling for a solution. The only thing to do was blank the disk and start over. So back to disk utility on the installer and write seven passes of zeros over the entire disk.

Six hours later I started installing a new OS. The install went flawlessly and quickly. I guess it likes having a perfectly blank slate to work with. At the end the installer quits and initiates a re-start.

Nothing the system couldn't see the drive and defaulted to starting off the DVD.

A Tuesday morning consult with my boss and our guy in IT resulted in a decision to not attempt to repair. The thinking was that we cold put a new drive in it. Spend a day setting it up and probably have another major failure somewhere else in the system in six months.

In stunningly non-corporate fashion, an estimate was acquired and approved by the end of business Tuesday. The shiny new 17 inch MacBook Pro arrived on my desk at noon the next day.

Then the work started. I spent the afternoon loading applications - and all of the various updates that had happened since we got the original disks. I had back-up copies of all my work projects and a folder of personal projects. (Don't mention those either.)

I did not have a backup of the iPhoto library. That was a bit of a blow since you can't go back and re-take photos. However most of the good ones I had pulled copies of and used in other contexts. So instead of 30 shots of a birthday party we have the two or three best.

All of my iTunes collection is on my iPod so none of that is lost. I don't think I have any back-ups of the few podcasts I created a while back but that's no great loss.

I did not have a back-up of my bookmarks. About 150 bookmarked blog RSS feeds gone. (I know. I backed up the work file and didn't back up the blog feeds. My priorities got messed up somewhere.)


I have spent a while tonight rebuilding the bookmarks. I know I have missed a few people because the lists seem a bit shorter.

Next I have to start on the address book that wasn't backed up either!

(UPDATE)
I have the new computer 96% set up. But since I never stop tweaking a system I suppose that's as close I'll ever get to done. I do have one interesting observation. Much is writtenin the MAC press and books on Apple about Steve Jobs' obssessive control and focus on every detail. Depending on who's writing it, this can be seen as either a strength or a fatal flaw.

Jobs is know to focus not only on the product but on it's packaging as well. He sees the unboxing of the product by the user as part of the marketing.

But Jobs slipped up. My brand new MacBook Pro came with OS X 10.5 installed. The box shows a large photo of a MacBook Pro running 10.4.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 08:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment