A Problem With The User

I logged on to the computer this afternoon, thought I’d write a little bit about the past week but then my screen flickered and shut off on the Mac laptop. I kept trying to boot the computer up but I’d get no response from the screen. Probably the logic board, again. Lucky thing that I had a month and a half left on the extended warranty I purchased. The first logic board went out about a year and a half after I got the computer in December 2002, and now almost exactly a year and a half later it goes out again. With my warranty now up for good on the Mac at the end of next month, I guess I’d better think about getting a new computer in the next year and a half.

So the Mac will be away for a week, and now I’m working on the backup computer, my old Dell Laptop. It’s a pretty heavy and clunky big thing when compared to my tiny, lightweight Mac laptop. Plus it’s much slower, and is still running Windows 98 SE, which I guess is pretty ancient at this point. I bought the Dell laptop the summer before I left for college, it was used at that point and I’d gotten a pretty good deal on it. I knew I’d need a computer so I worked and saved up my money for my own laptop. Since then the battery is no longer any good so it has to be plugged in if you want to use it. But that’s to be expected, I suppose, after all it is about 8 years old now. The little switch that shuts the screen off when you close the laptop is a little touchy so you have to fiddle with that to get the screen working when you start up the computer. That’s kind of a pain, but no big deal. Now that I think of it, I actually haven’t had to replace any hardware on the old Dell and it still runs, so it’s served as a good backup when the Mac is on the fritz. The last time the Mac went away for a week, I was able to finish my class projects on the Dell that week. If not for this thing, I probably would have been working at the school’s computer lab until midnight.

When the Mac started having problems today I was in the middle of watching the beginning of the race. I contemplated whether bringing the Mac to the Apple store after the race would be fine, but I figured there would be a huge line at the “Genius Bar” so I decided to just skip the race today. Good thing I did, I was in line at the Apple store for about an hour and a half, because I had to wait for the twenty teenagers in line in front of me who needed help updating the software on their iPods… something most people should be able to do at home themselves without much difficulty.

Apparently if you don’t update your iPod software, new songs purchased from the Apple music store might not play correctly. Hmm, didn’t know that, but I don’t own an iPod so why should have I? To me it seems kind of peculiar that that’s the case. Maybe it’s just the Apple store employee’s nice way of saying “you don’t know how to maintain your iPod, it’s all screwed up because of all the illegally downloaded half corrupt 64kbps crap you’ve been putting on it so now it needs to be reset.” That would be my guess. I didn’t realize it happened so often, there were literally a dozen people in there to get their stupid iPod’s settings reset and software updated. They, of course, didn’t pay anything for it, but I did - I paid by wasting two hours of my day waiting for their piddly little music players to get fixed, even though they could have just fixed them themselves if they’d had the capacity to try doing two minutes of their own troubleshooting..

But I don’t own an iPod, so maybe I shouldn’t criticize. Maybe they really are a pain to maintain, especially if it’s being connected to a Windows computer instead of a Mac computer, which was the case among most of those getting them fixed today. Considering I’ve been using Apple products so long and have only had basic hardware problems and never any software problems, I kind of doubt that it’s a problem with Apple’s software. It’s probably a problem with the user.

See-ya later.