December 7, 2006 | Filed under: technology
There’s nothing like coming home from a hard night’s work, turning on your computer and having it make an unholy horror-movie-screaming noise to rival Jamie Lee Curtis from her “Halloween” days. It started up okay, made it’s little “Happy Mac KaBong” sound, then…nothing. No desktop, no finder, no nothing. Only an apple staring back at me mockingly and a little endlessly spinning graphic. And then the screaming. Loud, maniacal screaming. Grinding of gears…nails on a chalkboard. Evil; a sound that said “You fool! You entrusted me with all your earthly information! Your banking, your photographs, your videos, your music. All the bits of your soul that can be stored on Read-Only Memory! Hah! I have hijacked it all and you will never see it again!Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!”
After I composed myself I waited the 2,560 seconds it took for AppleCare to begin manning the phone lines and ended up with this asshat:
Techie: Your problem is with a Powermac G4?
Me: No, I said it was a Powerbook G4.
Techie: (long pause) So that’s a portable computer?Me: …
I made my sickly laptop perform for him over the phone and he said he’d never heard anything like it his whole life. Great.
I feel as if my arm has been amputated at the elbow. Y’all may not hear from me for some time. As of now I’m writing this at the local CyberStation surrounded by kids playing Quake or whatever the hell it is that kids are playing these days.
Like I said: please kill me.
December 7, 2006
@ 4:28 pm
Gotta love tech support :).
Anyway, I hope you made backups of your important files. My iMac decided to stop working a while back, but thankfully I managed to grab the files off of it via my MacBook. Since then I’m backing up my data daily…
I’m not sure if you know anybody else in the neighborhood with a mac, but if you have a firewire cable, you can connect two macs together, and when you boot up the mac who’s having trouble right now, press and hold the T and your Mac will mount as an external firewire drive to the other mac. If that works, grab all the files you can get.
Oh, and if you decide to bring the mac in for support, assume they wipe your hard drive clean. They either like that, or it’s somehow mandatory. I’m learning towards the first ;).
Good luck!
(Oh and by the way: Hi! Long-time reader, first-time commenter)
-Dave
The Netherlands
December 7, 2006
@ 4:36 pm
sounds like someone needs a Batman toy…send me your address B, I will shop it out overnight! Cause nothing makes a bad situation better than getting a Batman toy from a dear friend….or in this case a guy you have only seen on the internet and neve actually met…but still….
December 8, 2006
@ 7:38 am
Cheeze kid, I feel you pain.
I’m a PC girl but something like that happened to me a while back. If it is not the hard drive you got a shot at saving your stuff, provided that the tech doesn’t wipe it clean first. The hard drive can be placed in another machine.
If it is the hard drive, well best not to speak about it. I hope and pray you have back-ups, a stack of CD/DVD copies or something.
Keep the faith.
December 8, 2006
@ 4:48 pm
What gena said. Basically you can try a 2.5″ external enclosure from newegg or macsales. Slap the old drive in there and see if Firewire (USB 2.0 sucks, not enough juice) will draw data out.
December 8, 2006
@ 4:50 pm
What gena said. Basically you can try a 2.5″ external enclosure from newegg or macsales. Slap the old drive in there and see if Firewire (USB 2.0 sucks, not enough juice) will draw data out.
December 8, 2006
@ 4:51 pm
What gena said. Basically you can try a 2.5″ external enclosure from newegg or macsales. Slap the old drive in there and see if Firewire (USB 2.0 sucks, not enough juice) will draw data out.
December 8, 2006
@ 4:53 pm
What gena said. Basically you can try a 2.5″ external enclosure from newegg or macsales. Slap the old drive in there and see if Firewire (USB 2.0 sucks, not enough juice) will draw data out.
December 8, 2006
@ 5:22 pm
Now the unanswered question is: what country were you calling for tech support?
So sorry to hear of all the problems. I know how frustrating it is to be without computer!
December 9, 2006
@ 9:08 am
Well.. you have my sympathy but, I’m sorry, I am going to have to insist that you post more videos soon. I can not have a good life without a video from you every once in awhile. I will be happy to contribute to a new computer. Set up a paypal account.
December 10, 2006
@ 6:00 am
My Powerbook G4 died on me a couple months ago…a much less noisy outing, however it cost me, about 300 bucks to get the hard disk replaced…
as for the chat with the Techie…
Ladies and Gents:
We have found a winner!
December 11, 2006
@ 1:50 pm
Maybe it is time to chuck it all and go back to New Orleans. They need you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/us/nationalspecial/11babies.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
-Bill
January 1, 2007
@ 3:24 pm
missb,
ugh–the horror.
i can recommend Tekserve on 23rd St very highly (like everyone else does). They do AppleCare if you’re covered. And if anyone can extract your info., they can.
October 26, 2010
@ 7:02 pm
Cool. Thanks for putting up this. Its always nice to see someone help out the community.