Posts

Poorly sick..

.. No, not me, my Mac.

Last wednesday was one of those nightmare scenarios every geek dreads. I got up fired up the mac, checked my email then went to grab some breakfast. On my return I was met with the rare but horribly daunting grey screen of death, otherwise known as a kernel panic.

I’ve only ever had a couple of these in over 5 years as a Mac owner and usually a power cycle is all that’s needed, but sadly not this time. Several reboots, safe boots, hardware self tests and verbose mode confusion boots later I’d come to the sickening realisation that yes, it’s broken.

I even stripped it right back to a minimal bootable configuration, removed all my drives and external peripherals, swapped the SSDs for the original boot drive which I knew was a valid boot disk, still no joy. Locked hard on the apple logo.

Damn.

So, genius bar appointment booked for Thursday morning where the lovely Nick went through much the same process I had before plugging in a USB drive to run some more thorough diagnostics on the main board before proclaiming that indeed it was a definitely a hardware fault and they’d have to take her in for the attention of very clever people who live behind the shiny aluminium portal that leads into the secret world beyond us mere mortals. I reckon I must’ve had a bit of dust in my eye or something because as they wheeled her off through the door it was like watching the vet wheel your dog off into the operating theatre and your not actually quite sure if you’ll ever see her again..

As a side note, tut tut Apple.. They said they’d phone me on Thursday evening with a status update. It’s Sunday now and i’m still waiting for that call..

Pimp My Mac, Pt 2

Thought I’d better report in with an update on my Mac upgrades..

Last night I fitted the SSDs and copied over my boot drive. This is the result:

[youtube width=”480″ height=”390″ video_id=”f34rqrxean8″]

Sorry about the delay at the login prompt. That wasn’t the Mac, it was me forgetting to swipe my fingerprint!
As you can see, it’s launching applications as fast as I can physically click the mouse, and that was including some fairly significant things including Filemaker, Lightroom, Photoshop and Dreamweaver Cs5..
That’ll do nicely  :)