What a week for technology. And not a good one.
First, my iMac. Up pops Time Machine with a warning that it hadn’t done a backup in 11 days. It would have been nice if it had told me sooner. Anyhow, it seems the power supply on my external drive had died, so that needs replacing. Not sure if it’s still under warranty.
Then my camera couldn’t read memory cards any more. That was new – a gift – so it could be swapped out, but inconvenient nonetheless. Particularly as I’d just bought an 8GB card for it.
The printer is still out of ink, which means not only can’t we print, but we also can’t copy or even scan and send faxes, despite the fact that neither of those last two jobs actually needs ink.
And to cap it all, Mabel, my trusty MacBook quite spectacularly died on Wednesday morning. Not just a little glitch or anything: she simply lost all of her long-term memory. Just like that. One moment she was happily chugging along, the next she couldn’t see the hard drive. She wouldn’t reboot, even from a DVD, so that drive was clearly out of bounds, too.
The only solution I could think of was to install OS X on an external drive and boot from that, which worked fine… until I rebooted, at which point that drive was corrupted, too.
The upshot, then, is that I’m now writing this on Mabel the Second. A quite strokable aluminium MacBook. Refurb, but it comes with a guarantee, and spec-wise is barely short of a MacBook Pro.
Very nice.
No dents, no scratches, and by all accounts just a few weeks old. So new that the battery has only been charged three times, and one of those times was me.
Not sure what to do with Mabel the First yet. Perhaps take out the drive just to be sure and then sell her for spares and repair.
