Apple from hell
A friend of mine asked me if I could help her with problems she was having with her Apple Macbook Pro. Beside my Iphone/Ipad usage I am a total Wintel guy. However despite that, I figured that depending on the problem, I may be able to address it using my above average trouble shooting/winging it skills.
Well it didn’t take long till I saw the first issue, the laptop had absolutely no free space on it’s internal hard drive. When a computer runs out of hard drive space all sorts of bad things happen. One of those things is the system becomes extremely slow and unresponsive. The first order was I had to clear up some space so the computer would stop choking.
This was more difficult than it sounds since the external drive that is normally hooked up to the laptop had crashed. Luckily I brought an external 2 TB drive along. I somehow figured out how to get it formatted with the HFS file system so I could write to it. I then started copying off music files, over 125 gig of music files to the external drive.
I found getting around in the Apple OS to be very frustrating. It seemed very difficult to do things I can do simply in Windows like copy and paste files. I felt like I was in a foreign country where nobody spoke english.
When I saw the estimated completion time of 2 hours I was not happy. Well I then turned my attention to the crashed external drive, which according to my friend, had valuable pictures on it. I could tell as soon as I powered it up there was a problem, as I could feel the drive keep trying to initialize.
I tried everything I could to get the data off the drive. The best I could do was being able to see the directories on the drive. However when I tried to copy anything the drive would just die again. To say it was frustrating would be an understatement.
I wound up taking the laptop and external drive home to screw with more. I didn’t get to bed until 12:30 🙁
This weekend I again feel like I have a tidal wave in front of me. Besides chores and computer problems I need to do the prep for the upcoming road trip next week. I really need to unplug, I am feeling steamrolled and I hate the sensation.
Devyn Damore
I’d recommend to your friend that she look into Apple’s iTunes Match program. For a nominal annual fee, iTunes analyzes your music library. Then, any music that is in your library that is available for purchase in the itunes store, will be migrated to your cloud, from the store. Free. Any music in your library that is not available in the iTunes Store will be uploaded to your cloud. The beauty of this is, with the vast iTunes Store catalog, there will generally be very little upload time. Another bonus is if you have any crappy Limewire or other unlicensed copies of songs, these will be replaced with licensed iTunes copies. Again, free (apple paid a billion dollars with a B in legal and licensing to be able to do this . With all your music in the cloud, this will free up much hard drive space. All your music can be streamed or downloaded to any of your devices any time you want as long as you have at least a 3G connection.