Tag Archives: imac

Failure and recovery…

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I was raised in the age of the personal computer. Not long after the first Apple Macintosh ended up in my elementary school’s “computer lab,” one landed on our desk at home. Still, though, I don’t necessarily consider myself a “digital native.” For the most part, my computers have always simply been productivity tools that more or less live on my desk. I don’t generally ask them to do anything extraordinary or heroic – a bit of word processing, web browsing, and video streaming. 

I also have a bit of a habit of keeping my computers just a bit too long. Unlike my phone, as long as the computer is puttering along, I’m mostly satisfied to let it keep going even at a slowed pace. In 30+ years of computer ownership, that’s always been good enough.

Good enough always is right up to the point where it isn’t… which is apparently the point I reached with my 10-year-old iMac last Thursday afternoon. Sometime between when I signed out of work for the day at 4:00 and when I sat down and tried to stream an episode of Game of Thrones while I had dinner at 5:00 (don’t judge me), I suffered what I’ve taken to calling a “catastrophic hard drive failure.” 

If you haven’t lost a hard drive unexpectedly, I don’t recommend it. I’ve spent the last three days slowly putting my electronic life back together. Needing to unexpectedly buy a new computer, of course, just adds insult to injury.

For the last five or six years, I’ve been paying a nominal monthly fee to have my computer backed up “in the cloud.” That has honestly been the saving grace of this experience once I remembered that I actually hadn’t lost decades of photos, writing, finances, and every other kind of file and record you can imagine. Once I got past the initial terror at the possibility of losing everything, getting it all back was just a matter of following all the steps – and downloading a lot of software. 

I’m not absolutely thrilled with my new 24-inch iMac. Stepping down from the 27-inch model feels, in some ways, like a downgrade. It’s a fine machine and I still like the all-in-one form factor, but I’m really missing the extra screen real estate. I won’t rule out needing to add a second monitor at some point to compensate for that. For now, I’m trying to be satisfied with having brough things back to life in fairly short order and without too much trouble. 

For my next trick, I’ll be ordering a new external hard drive so I can start keeping an onsite back up of everything. For most situations that should be more convenient and really cut down the amount of time it takes to recover… but you can bet I’ll keep paying that monthly fee for online backup. It proved to be some of the best money I’ve ever spent on a subscription. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Standards. As a matter of principle, I never hold anyone to a higher standard than I hold myself. By the same token I don’t hold them to a lower one either. I’m many things but I do my best to avoid having hypocrite show up on that list – especially when it’s no harder a matter than maintaining just a little bit of consistency. Jaded as I am, though, I still find I can be surprised when people seem to behave with no sense of personal standards at all. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure whether it bothers me more that they do it or that I care.

2. Low Expectations. The high point of this week at the office was the arrival and unboxing of a new industrial strength shredder. I’m not even making that up. Given the volume of paper we push a heavy duty shredder isn’t a luxury item. It’s damned near an essential. An essential that we haven’t had for the last quarter of a year. It makes me a little sad to find my expectations of what constitutes a “good day” have been lowered so far that being able to turn PowerPoints into confetti now falls near the very top of the list.

3. Apple. I found myself reading through the initial reports from this afternoon’s Apple product rollout and rather than finding myself in need of selling a kidney for some new tech, I found myself mostly shrugging with something that approximated indifference. The latest iteration of iPad lacked something of the wow factor of a truly new product. The new iMac looks well enough kitted up, but not nearly enough to get me to drop $3K+ on on a desktop computer. There was nothing there that will find me leaping from bed at 3AM to make sure my pre-order is in. I know that every new product update can’t be a show stopper, but I’d have appreciated a little bit of “wow” when it comes time to deliver what should be iconic product offerings.