Mac attack

I'll confess it, I am a mac person, and with all the great marketing campaigns they've had over the past few years, who wouldn't be? Unfortunately, this post is more about Mac Loathe than Mac Love. About a week and a half ago, Dan was at home working on some important applications with a deadline fast approaching. In the just over 2 years we have had our Mac, we never had any problems with it, and our positive experience had definitely converted us to be "Mac people". Unfortunately even our beloved Mac occasionally has some little glitches and on this fateful night, it froze for no apparent reason. Of course like most of you, we immediately tried to recall the last time we had saved the documents we'd been working on and waited to see if the freeze would clear. After a few minutes when nothing happened, we decided to just restart and go back to the latest saved version. No big deal right? Just turn the computer back on right? WRONG! We were definitely surprised when we went to turn our pretty little apple back on and all she did was make some funny noises. Even though I try to assume the best, I usually assume the worst, so I was immediately worried there was something really wrong. Dan calmed me down and we decided to let it rest overnight in case the computer needed to cool down. Unfortunately in the morning nothing had changed so we took mac to our local genius bar to have the professionals take a look. This is when we received THE BAD NEWS! Apparently computers have these important little things called logic boards (basically the brain of the computer) and ours had died, which is pretty major and ironic since out warranty had expired TWO WEEKS PRIOR! If you logic board dies, your computer pretty much can't operate or turn on at all. We were sort of bummed that there was no immediate option to retrieve the precious files, but we let that go as Mac dude explained to us our options. Basically it boiled down to buy a new computer, or fixing the problem We decided to have them backup our Data since apparently the Mac Repair people are notorious for not caring what is on your hard drive and then send the baby on vacation to get fixed, Simple enough right?

We felt okay about things until we got a phone call the next day giving us THE REALLY BAD NEWS ! When they had tried to retrieve our files, they were inaccessible because of the damage so in order to get all of our documents, music, and pictures from the past three years we would need to send our little apple to a special data recovery service that can run anywhere from $500-$1,500 depending on the damage. Yikes right? At this point we would more than be paying for a new computer! Needless to say we were pretty disappointed all weekend about small fortune it was going to cost to get all of our files and fix our computer which was running at least $900. By Saturday we had decided our game plan was going to be that we'd buy a new computer, then go ahead and get our files when we felt like we had some extra cash to burn and in the meantime let the dead mac sit around collecting dust. We were still mad about the cost and the lost files, but at least a bit excited about the possibility of a new computer.

Well... later that night when I had come to terms with the death of our computer I was explaining the whole story to my dad over the phone. In the irony of the moment, he suggested putting it in the freezer or dropping it on the ground. I laughed at first but thought, what have I got to lose. Well guess what, no sooner than I had given my Mac a little drop (about 5 inches) she magically turned on in full working order. My first reaction was pure joy, and my second reaction was to curse the stupid people at the Mac store who told us there was no hope for our little ibook! Since the apple store on 5th avenue is open 24 hours a day (don't ask me why, maybe for emergencies like ours!) we ran down there immediately to buy an external hard drive in case her revival didn't last. I am now happy to say that all of our files are backed up, and although little mac is still acting funny, at least she is not dead!

The moral of the story is, even though the geniuses at the genius bar seem like they know everything, they don't and when all else fails, drop the stupid computer and it just might start working! P.S. Sorry this post is a mile long and also, if you really care about your files and don't want them lost, BACK THEM UP!