Ah, jaysis, I should’ve known better than to declare victory in my battle with the auld iMac so. Froze up on me again it did, as before, after less than 12 hours of extremely light use.
It caused me to explode in righteous wrath, and before I could go for a wee ride in my St. Patrick’s Day finery too.
So this guy walks into an Apple Store with a busted iMac and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before. …
OK, so you may not have heard this one before.
Long-suffering readers of the DogS(h)ite know that my once-trusty late-2009 iMac went sideways shortly after I “upgraded” it to Mavericks, in the process leapfrogging over Lion and Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard.
Its misbehavior gradually intensified, and unable to diagnose the problem and devise a solution I finally dragged it down to the Duke City Apple Store, where a Genius critical of my OS management advised a nuke-and-pave of the hard disk drive and another “upgrade,” this time a clean install of Yosemite.
Five days and five crashes later I returned to discuss the issue further, and this time they took the doddering old iBeast in for a full brain scan.
“You might want to crack the case and check it for schmutz,” I quipped. “We have a dog and two cats, and there’s probably enough fur in there to build a yeti.” Oh, how we chortled there at the Genius Bar, techs and customers alike. Laugh, I thought I’d die.
A few days later the telephonic discussions commenced. The Geniuses were unable to replicate my issues, and their extended evaluations, like my own basic home-mechanic checks, found no hardware issues. The iMac was running a sparkling new OS and nothing but Apple software — save for Flash, which I needed for video, and SuperDuper!, which I needed to back up the drive before service — and they, like me, were at a loss.
Hard drive? Fine. Video card? OK. Bad memory? Nope. Thermal management issues? I’ve heard about temp problems, sensors detaching from drives, fans failing. Sorry, we don’t find any hardware issues atall atall.
“Did you crack the case and have a look inside? We have pets, you know. …”
Bingo. They finally opened ‘er up and found enough dust and fur clogging the fans to assemble an earth-toned pantsuit for a plus-size crazy cat lady. It actually felt a couple pounds lighter as I carried it out of the store.
This morning the old iBeast is ticking over smoothly, which if it continues will be nice, because the 2010 Mac Mini I’ve been using since Tuesday doesn’t have the oomph to run a couple different versions of the WordPress CMS, edit words, photos and videos, and do all the other things I need to do to keep my share of the lights on here at Rancho Pendejo.
Best of all? No charge for the janitorial work. When was the last time you walked away from a mechanic of any sort with your pants up and your wallet still in its pocket? I call that service and then some.
I’ll have to inform the cats who run the Innertubes. Medals, commendations and promotions may be in order.
You’ll excuse me if I’m not too excited about the Apple Watch and the latest, greatest MacBook.
The old iMac has been acting up the better part of quite some lately — a function, I believe, of the Mavericks “upgrade” I performed last year — and last week, after yet another spate of inexplicable freezes that I could not resolve via Safe Boot, Apple Hardware Test, Disk Utility, DiskWarrior, disconnecting external drives and/or monitors, and finally the deployment of chicken blood, rattles and incantations, I waved the white flag and dragged the doddering iBeast down to the local Apple Store for a chat with a Genius.
The Genius advised a “nuke and pave,” erasing the drive and installing a fresh copy of the OS. I had my doubts, having done way too much looking around online to believe that a solution would be so simple.
Still, I thought, I’m backed up all to be-damn, from Time Machine to SuperDuper!, two copies of each. Want to try Yosemite? Sure, why not? How much worse could it be? Let ‘er buck, cowboy.
So I dragged the iBeast back home with a nuked and paved HDD and a brand-new copy of Yosemite, and then let it sit overnight, to cure, or rest, or whatever. The next day, I booted it up and set about the onerous chore of configuring what amounted to a brand-new, 6-year-old computer.
Installing a new OS did not include fresh copies of the iWork and iLife suites. I didn’t want to drag over old files and applications from my backups, reasoning that if they had bugs, I’d be giving my New World Order a case of Old World pants rabbits. So I decided I’d use those drives as storage for now — sort of a Waste Isolation Pilot Project of bits and bytes — and downloaded fresh copies of Pages and iMovie for starters, plus a smallish OS update.
Word and Photoshop? Nah. Fuggem, I thought. Let’s keep this thing all Apple for now, see what transpires.
What transpired? Freezes. Just like before. One on Saturday, a second on Sunday and a third today.
Bloody exasperating, that is. Especially when you open Console to see a grinning octupus-dragon-man-thing wearing a “Think Different” T-shirt laughing at you and gibbering, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
So, no, thanks, I don’t need a skinny, $1,299 laptop with a shite camera and one oddball port that will require a backpack full of adapters. And I really don’t need a Dick Tracy watch, especially if it makes me look like a Dick Head.
I already know what time it is. It’s time to retire this iBox. And I’m not buying another one.
Is the Super Bowl finally over? No, I see we’re still second-guessing coaches, lip-syncing sharks and that crucial, botched call — Nationwide’s decision to run that dead-kid ad instead of throwing it into the trash.
We didn’t watch any of it here at Rancho Pendejo, not even the ads. Herself was on a mission from God to clean up the joint, and I was doing a job of work, hammering away at a video review of the Novara Mazama for Adventure Cyclist and trying to troubleshoot ongoing technical glitches with the old iMac.
At 6 years of age, this ‘puter may be nearing the end of its useful existence, though a 15-year-old G3 “Pismo” PowerBook is still ticking right along with all its original equipment. Not so the iMac. Its optical drive croaked a while back, and ever since I “upgraded” to Mavericks I’ve been enjoying occasional and inexplicable freezes that force me into an irksome hard reset that occasionally costs me a bit of work. Kindly old Doc Google tells me I’m not alone in my suffering, and this is one of the reasons I’m dragging my feet on the Yosemite and iOS 8 upgrades.
Last night after a weirdo crash that left both monitors black, but with a moveable cursor, I booted into Safe Mode, which runs a few diagnostics, then said fuck it and booted again, this time into the Recovery HD, and ran Disk Utility.
The hard drive “appears to be OK,” says DU, so I repaired permissions and called it good. This morning nothing was on fire or defunct, which is better.
Now if Samsung will get around to installing a new drain pump in our 5-month-old washing machine, we’ll really have it going on. The goddamn thing has been on the sidelines for a week and I need to upgrade my undies to something a little, um, fresher.
Today my “office” is at the Erna Fergusson Library on San Mateo. I pulled the early shift at the Northeast Heights Satellite Coffee outlet, because a day without a breakfast burrito is like a day without sunshine, and then moved over here to free up some parking space for the caffeine-deprived. I’d have used the Juan Tabo branch, which is closer to Rancho Pendejo, but it’s closed on Sundays.
The phrase “your tax dollars at work” has become a punchline for eons, but I doubt it’s funny to the three dozen or so folks who were queued up outside in the hot sun, waiting for the library to open at 1 p.m. Most of them were in the line to use the facility’s computers. Having mine in a messenger bag — two of them, actually — I felt slightly yuppified and ostentatious.
Imagine doing without the Innertubes and computers in this day and age. If you want to go low tech, that’s one thing; but having to is something else, especially if you’re trying to find, oh, I don’t know, a job or health care or child care or something.
