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 oh.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

This winter, I am on hard wired Internet. On the road, I use cellular Internet. My iPod and iPad use wifi. Do I need to shell out for a router so I can have wifi? Nope. My Mac can turn my Ethernet or cellular Internet into a secure wifi signal via Airport.

Well, that’s enough playing with my new toy; back to work I go.

(posted from my iPad!)

UPS doesn’t deliver to Lethbridge for some reason, so Purolator does the deliveries for them. I got hold of Purolator this morning and was told that a driver attempted delivery yesterday morning at 10:30, which was horse hockey since I was in the office at that time and have a full view of the parking lot. Anyway, I could tell I was going to have several more days of waiting for the package, so I decided to just go to the depot and pick up the package myself! Well, that wasn’t without drama, because dealing with UPS is always frustrating, but I finally got to bring home my iPad!!!

my iPad "Miles"!

Isn’t it beautiful?

I had to pay UPS $48 in brokerage and other fees, which is fine, and actually a lot less than I expected. So the iPad wound up being about $60 more than it would have cost to buy it in Canada. BUT my out of pocket cost is $100 lower than if I had just bought through Apple since I got to use my Amazon gift certificates so my convoluted acquisition process makes sense.

I can’t wait to play with it, but I have a huge job to do tonight. I will let it taunt me a little longer. 😀