What. A. Weekend.<\/p>\n
My computer was behaving normally on Friday evening, but yesterday morning it started to freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It really felt like it got abducted by Microsoft fiends overnight as that’s how my last Windows machine behaved daily. After a couple of those hard reboots it refuse to boot again. Uh oh.<\/p>\n
I decided after spending some time on the ‘support’ forums that I never want to go back there again. People get a perverse pleasure out of suggesting a worst-case scenario. Anyway, it took a good part of the day for me to figure out how to run some hardware diagnostics and determine that my hard drive ($$) and logic board ($$$$$) are fine. I actually learned more about troubleshooting Macs yesterday than I have in the eight years since I made the switch! And I am very impressed by all the tools available. I could never have hoped to troubleshoot a Windows machine to this degree.<\/p>\n
By late evening, I was seriously backed up on transcription and needed the issue resolved. Since the trouble appeared to be software related, I decided to just wipe my hard drive and reinstall OSX. I’m sure there could have been a more techie solution, but this was easy and I was confident that a clean install would fix the problem.<\/p>\n
Once I had a fresh copy of OS X set up, I restored my old system using my last Time Machine backup. That took the night and I woke up to a happy computer as though I hadn’t lost a whole day with it. If I had known how to run the hardware diagnostics, I could have had the system restored and running again by lunch. Oh, well, live and learn.<\/p>\n
The moral of this story is that you should back up your computer often!!! Time Machine backs up automatically every hour, with the last one being just before I went to bed on Friday. Since I wasn’t able to do anything yesterday morning, I didn’t lose anything, making the decision to wipe the drive an easy one.<\/p>\n
I’d like to invite my Mac-using readers to hold down CMD-V the next time they boot up. That will bring them to Verbose Mode, which means that instead of seeing a splash screen, you will see what’s actually happen to your system to bring it to life. Very interesting!<\/p>\n
This incident just made me fall in love with Macs all over again and shows me just how far I’ve come with them. I had some major issues with my first Mac that were 100% attributed to my being used to using them. Eight years later, I can debug issues myself. Even with that long of using Windows, I wouldn’t have dreamed of that level of proficiency with the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What. A. Weekend. My computer was behaving normally on Friday evening, but yesterday morning it started to freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It really felt like it got abducted by Microsoft fiends overnight as that’s how my last Windows machine behaved daily. After a couple of those hard reboots it refuse to boot again. Uh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1041,632,1226,635,5,9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alberta","category-canada","category-lethbridge","category-north-america","category-rving","category-tech","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}