Computer Death

Well, a couple of weeks ago my Macintosh Powerbook G4 bit the dust. Yes, that Powerbook. The one that Robin & Rich Bresnahan gifted to me for all the work I did on Robins debut CD. The one that I have babied (better than my own children at times) since it arrived at my house. It was a sad, sad, day. As bad as the day the music died! Worse even.... getting the picture yet?

I ran a quick diagnostic on it and the hard drive checked out fine. A trip to the Apple store confirmed the same thing. The problem was a corrupt start up kernal. The solution was 2 steps. First, use another Mac to boot up the machine from and reinstall the OS. Sounds easy enough. Oh, no.... We managed to get it to boot up one time. It wouldn't allow us to reinstall the OS and then the computer went dark (a lonely trumpet played taps in the background). It was on to step 2. Sending it off to Apple. I was told at the Apple store that it would be a flat rate of $310 to fix whatever the trouble would be. I had to wait a week for the money to come in and once in I called Apple and set it up. Another few days for the box to arrive and off it went.

I got it back in 2 days time! Not bad Apple, not bad. I opened the box, read the packing slip inside and my heart sank. They replaced the optical drive, the hard drive, and the mother board. I lost everything on the machine. And before you ask, yes, I had backed things up. Just not everything. I lost all my fonts, pictures, music in iTunes, music files I had recorded, Photoshop brushes, Illustrator brushes, bookmarks, tons of stuff. It was bad. Real bad!

I spent all of this morning and part of this afternoon reinstalling some of my software. What a pain! Installing the software isn't so bad... it's redownloading all of the gazillion updates these software companies have released since the software's release. It took just a bit over an hour and a half just to get Adobe Creative Suite back on my computer. I still need to contact some software companies about software keys so I can redownload some recording software I lost. There's still a lot of work to be done including going through my backup discs to see what I've got & what I don't. I guess the bottom line is... no matter how much you back up a computer there is always something that is going to be missed and you are going to lose some data. The trick is to lose as little as possible.