D'vorahDavida
Yetzirah

Rotten Apple
Tue Aug 16 2016

Five years and four months ago my exotic iMac arrived on my doorstep. This was what I was going through during the first few days of my Apple learning curve... Please take a moment to read it. http://www.deardiary.org/yetzirah/2011/04/29/apple-cores-on-foreign-shores/ Over the last few weeks, my aging Italian friend has been less than his charming self. The cd drive was the first to go. It refused to play movies, and even though it SAID it had completed burning a music disc, this turned out to be a blatant lie. Totally blank disc was spit out of the mysterious slot on the side of Mac's silver and black enigmatic exterior. Then it started to freeze up. This is SO unusual that I knew I had better start backing up my data. I bought myself something called a Gorilla flash drive with 32! Gigs of memory. Unbelievable. Over the course of a week or so, I loaded it up with all sorts of archives. I was surprised to find out at the end of my file transfers, I still have 28 gigs left! How do they DO that on those tiny little do dads? Anyway, day before yesterday the pixilation began. I looked up on the internet different ways to 'fix' this problem. And was successful. For a while. When I turned it on this morning however, something akin to the green screen with all the symbols from The Matrix was dancing around on the Mac's white background. I had officially been handed 'the white screen of death'. Then all attempts to get the computer to start up failed. I've decided five years and four months is a pretty darn good run for a computer and I have to be honest and tell you that except for a very annoying email glitch that happened when I upgraded the OS, that Mac did not give me one moment's bit of trouble. So I won't be bitter about Mr. Shiny Pants deciding to leave me for the sunnier shores of permanent retirement. But I will admit to a certain trepidation about what awaits me when the newest model of iMac shows up at my doorstep. I hope they haven't changed TOO much in five years. My ability to run up steep learning curves may have suffered a certain loss of flexibility and stamina. Perhaps I should dust off my yoga mat and get ready. It hasn't shipped yet. But the new one is in the works. Hopefully by the end of the day, I'll have an arrival estimate. I was going to take a picture of my now defunct Mac, sitting on the bread table, next to the egg baskets looking very odd indeed, [all that high tech next door to hen fruit] but I realized I have no idea how to process photos on this laptop. I'll have to work on that in the next few days... in case it takes longer for the new one to get here than I hope. Me without ability to share photos easily? This is not a good situation. I'll see what I can do about that. Will keep you posted. Ciao!   lime-wild          
3 Comments
  • From:
    Cheryl T (Legacy)
    On:
    Tue Aug 16 2016
    Good luck with the new beast. What shall you name it?
  • From:
    FutureCat (Legacy)
    On:
    Tue Aug 16 2016
    That's one of the things I don't like about Macs - when a PC is close to death, you can usually replace a component or two and keep it running a bit longer. But when a Mac dies, it's just dead. You can't get inside them to fix stuff (well, at least not without much more sophisticated tools than my little screwdriver). Their software is a bit like that too - it's either working or it's not, and there's not much the average user can do about it. Basically, I like computers I can threaten with violence until they do what I want :-)
  • From:
    Mamallama (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Aug 17 2016
    R.I.P. Mac. You were a loyal subject while you lasted.