Mac Woes

Why oh why oh WHY must my Pismo laptop make me so crazy? I used to love it so much. I sang its praises to high heaven. I wanted to be in one of those ads that feature happy ex-PC users who have seen the light and now look delighted and cool and hip and use Macs. I really did.

But ever since last March, when my hard drive went completely bust, completely out of the blue, it's been nothing but a nightmare. I feel like wailing and screaming, but instad of that, I'm going to offer you the complete sad and sorry tale.

My first move was to enlist a friend at Mount Madonna to try and fix it. Three friends got involved, actually. They did their best (it was truly a valiant collective effort), but in the end, all we managed to do was extract the data and save it to a back-up drive. Better than nothing, no question. Thanks Tom, Ramnath and Sri Gyan!

So I got online and bought a new hard drive, bigger and better, and had it shipped to me at MMC. Feeling happy that I was in the US and could buy in the US and get it shipped so fast so cheap. Little did I know....

After it arrived, Tom went to a lot of trouble to install everything, and we did our best to slap back in my old files. But something went terribly wrong. I never did find out what. All I know is that it worked for about ten minutes, and then it didn't. At all.

At this point I was getting ready to leave Mount Madonna (in addition to getting ready to throw the darn computer on the floor and jump on it in a fit of frustration), so I just took the darn thing home with me, busted, and figured that sweet Raj back in Vancouver would help me out. Which he did. Only after an assessment of the situation, he pronounced my new hard drive to be dead beyond any hope of repair.

So what to do? As it turned out, Fujitsu America didn't want to deal with me, as I was now in Canada without a US shipping address, and Fujitsu Canada wouldn't help me because it was purchased in the States. Watch out for that, fyi. So in the end, another friend had to get involved, and I gave Justin's father's address to Fujitsu so they could send me a new one under warranty. In the meantime, Raj installed his back-up hard drive so at least I had a computer to work on. Thanks, Raj!

I shipped the broken one off to Texas. And then I headed off on my summer of adventure, leaving the blasted laptop back at Graveley Manor with Raj. The hard drive took a while to be delivered to Justin's dad, but I did eventually get a call from a perplexed woman in California wondering who I was and why she had a package with her address and my name and phone number from Fujitsu. Sorted that out, and she said she'd mail it. Thanks, Justin, Gordon and Susie!

Then it took a long time to arrive in Vancouver, but eventually it did. Of course, it was delivered to the post office, who required me to go in and sign for it. But I wasn't going to be in Vancouver before the final date they would keep it till, so I had to write a permission note for Raj, with a copy of my ID, so he could go get it for me. Thanks again, Raj!

Raj continued in his role of superhero by spending hours with my machine, while I was waltzing around yoga boot camp and whatever else, and he got it working fabulously. He even had to go to three different stores to get four tiny screws to keep it safely in place. When I picked it up a couple weeks ago, it was a beautiful, fast, quiet little laptop with all my old files, pictures, music, programs, everything. I was very happy. THANKS RAJ!

But then... oh no, this story does not yet have a happy ending... but then last night, it started to go weird. It froze on me, and I had to force it to shut down. Then it wouldn't boot. I got on the phone to poor Raj, who got me to reset it, after which it worked again. But since then, in a mere 24 hours, it has frozen three times, and I have had to reset it as many. I've also had to repair permissions in order to get Word and Excel to work again, after they inexplicably decided to STOP working.

What is going on? What will be the next chapter in this sorry soap opera of the Pismo? I'm not sure I can take much more. All I know is that if I didn't have kind Mac wizard friends, I would have spent more on fixing this thing than it is worth. Seriously. (Maybe then I would have just decided to buy a new G4 and wouldn't be going through any of this, though? Hmmm.)

If you are still reading at this point, I'm amazed. I can't believe I just spent 20 minutes writing out the whole drama... of my laptop. If you are still reading because you think you have the solution... I'll love you forever! Any takers?