Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Speed Bump on the Information Highway



My wife's Macbook Pro started acting up last night–printer and scanner were not printing and scanning, and when I restarted the computer, I got the Lonely Silver Screen: The restart sosumi, yes, but no Apple logo, no spinning ball, and naught else ...


So, off to the Apple Store, having first made an appointment to sit at the Genius Bar. Tech wired it up, fiddled with this and that, and declared the hard drive done crashed.


More of a problem with laptops, and since this one was functioning as a desktop most of the time, two-and-a-half years isn't bad.


They can replace the drive easily enough, have it done in a day or two. Maybe recover and port the data across, but if not, fortunately we have been running Time Machine, which automatically backs up all new input every hour, so restoration of the system should be as easy as checking a box when we power things up again.


Out of warranty, of course ...


It's always something. 

3 comments:

Ians@evolution.org.nz said...

first rule of computing - back up early.

second rule of computing - back up often.

These are quite cool...

http://www.drobo.com/

J.D. Ray said...

Scary stuff. I had a scare recently when my MacBook Pro started acting up (four years old) and I discovered that my TimeCapsule was out of service as well. Apple replaced the TimeCapsule as under warranty, then I backed up the laptop before taking it in for service. Turned out I was just running too low on hard drive space, and the old girl was just bucking a little. Some file cleanup and an upgrade to Lion seems to have returned her to normal running.

Steve Perry said...

Apple called back later the same afternoon, and I picked the laptop up early this a.m. Reloaded everything from the back-up, took about ten minutes, and we are good to go.

Nice when things work like they are supposed to work.