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laptop woe
Oct. 12th, 2007 09:14 amI've been expecting my little Dell laptop to die for years now. I bought it used, installed an OS, and used it mainly for school and writing. That was back in '99. Back when I bought it, it was already past its theoretical useful lifetime. Eight years later it's still working, albeit verrry slowly compared to modern laptops.
Meanwhile, the shiny new Powerbook that I splurged on three years ago has gone belly-up. First the hard drive started making grinding sounds, then more ominous grinding sounds... and now it refuses to boot up at all. I've wiped the drive, done a safe boot into a clean install, and it still won't let me past the bootup screen. The kid at the genius bar informed me that my hard drive was probably shot. I checked the internet; apparently a bunch of G4 hard drives fail within the first three years. Woe is me.
It's much more of a personal betrayal when one's Mac turns out to be a sucky piece of machinery with a shortened lifespan. Particularly when one paid easily 2.5 times what one would have paid for a PC. My next computer won't be as pretty, but it'll definitely be cheaper.
(Actually, my next computer will probably be the XO Laptop, which doesn't have rotating media, thereby sidestepping this particular issue. But the point is, I'm done with paying premium prices for Macs until I'm sure they'll last more than a couple of years.)
Meanwhile, the shiny new Powerbook that I splurged on three years ago has gone belly-up. First the hard drive started making grinding sounds, then more ominous grinding sounds... and now it refuses to boot up at all. I've wiped the drive, done a safe boot into a clean install, and it still won't let me past the bootup screen. The kid at the genius bar informed me that my hard drive was probably shot. I checked the internet; apparently a bunch of G4 hard drives fail within the first three years. Woe is me.
It's much more of a personal betrayal when one's Mac turns out to be a sucky piece of machinery with a shortened lifespan. Particularly when one paid easily 2.5 times what one would have paid for a PC. My next computer won't be as pretty, but it'll definitely be cheaper.
(Actually, my next computer will probably be the XO Laptop, which doesn't have rotating media, thereby sidestepping this particular issue. But the point is, I'm done with paying premium prices for Macs until I'm sure they'll last more than a couple of years.)
