Intel Mac took a beating: still good!
 

Folks,
just wanted to report on my lappy: I left it on a supposedly secure perch in my hotel room in San Cristobal de las Casas (Mex). While out for a walk some construction down below really caused a hammering and made my lappy attempt suicide.

About 4 feet down to brick, right on the corner of the brick. Laptop was open and running :( I found her face down and immediately attempted CPR (on myself!)

Good news: seems to run fine after some finaggling. Wow! Bad news: I was using Filevault, Mac OS X's native file security stuff, and because of that all my stuff was subject to loss. Of course, I hadn't yet got around to backing everything up!

I recovered my journals (a month's worth so far) and some other miscellania. All photos had been backed up. My music is on my iPod, which incidentally is NOT a backup to your iTunes, i.e. you can't just plug it in and suck the music back to the laptop if your hard drive crashes or pseudo-crashes like mine. So everything important, except the music, is good to go.

Lesson: be extra, EXTRA careful with this stuff if you like having it. AND don't use Mac's Filevault if there is a chance your system could shutdown unexpectedly, like un-clean power, low battery, shake to the hard drive, etc. I never will again.

Cheers,
Mitch

Natural History Museum
 

I am surprised someone is still using Mac.
It's like a Trabant running at pure gold...

What an odd reference! I had to wiki it.

Not sure I understand...my machine has been, and still is, reliable and fast.

I'll let y'all known if the hard drive holds up over the next while. hmmm...what a story to have to replace a Mac part somewhere in South America.

Fun yet to be had, nothing but dreams for now...

:rolleyes2:

Mitch

sorry Mitch, didnt mean to be rude, just my little crusade against Apple and its way of doing things... MS isnt any better anyway...
ignore me please.

my best regards.

GNU/Linux. It's the only way to go :)

I got my first look at Mac OSX a few days ago, and (glossy GUI aside), I kind of liked it. I still feel a little bit bad about that actually...

Is yours MacBook Pro with aluminum casing?

I've had my 3 years old PowerBook 12" fallen three times badly, one time from MC seat onto concrete floor, once from my head height onto wooden floor with open monitor. The frame is bent, lots of wear marks but it keeps going.

Hoping to upgrade it to MacBook Pro 15" soon, it's a pity they don't have 12" version of it tho.

I love the UNIX (FreeBSD) based OSX. :)

Oh yes, the FileVault should be better off unless you work for FBI or military or something like that...

Getting Music off your ipod
 

Hi there Mitch,

I had the same problem with my ipod and a PC that I had trashed. You can actually get your music back off your ipod, although it took me a couple of hours and had to use non apple techniology. It all worked fine. Try using google to research it, but some thing like

HOW-TO: Get music OFF your iPod - Engadget

should help

Good luck

Sharepod will get your music from your ipod back onto your hard drive
SharePod Download - Softpedia

I love the iPod tips, gents, thank you! I'll look into that.

It's not an aluminum cased Mac, just the tough plastic. Some small gouges on the corner, and that's the only external damage. After some more extensive use, however, it seems like the computer is having a hard time writing larger files to the hard disk, it just freezes some times. Crappy! I can use any app. I want no prob, but yeah, if I have to write a large file something can go stupid on me.

I want to try and save what I can and do a whole re-format when I have sometime. All my important data (photos/music/journal) is backed up. The only thing that isn't backed up is my disk image of my PC that I have to run Parallels and Mapsource. Yargh. I'll find a work around, always do. And a an external back up hard drive has been on my shopping list for over a year, but here I am over a month in to my RTW and still don't have one. Nice! I'm such a slacker.

TTYL ;-)

Mitch

PS have I mentioned how much I really hate computers?

Good tip, Thankyou!

Mitch, sorry for the dropped mac, I have had a similar experience with my ibook, tough as hell and three years later its begging for an upgrade to macbook pro!

It does sound potentially as though there is a loose memory chip in there causing you the slow file transfer, or crashing altogether.

Check under system profiler, to see what hardware is running, hopefully it is merely a case of unscrewing and jiggling ram back into the slot or maybe buying a RAM upgrade.

Cheers G