Saturday, February 07, 2009

Plus, We Are Again Having Technical Difficulties

Although my gratitude remains heartfelt to Matthew-the-Macintosh-Evangelist, I confess it only took a couple of months to realise that I wasn't as convinced by the product as he is. I like my Macbook a lot. I just tend to think . . . it's a computer. I know my tastes aren't honed to appreciate the subtleties in computers the way they are able to tell coffee from coffee. Heck, I can't even do half the things on my computer that my computer could allow me to do if I knew how. (Does that make any sense?)

Mostly I think I mean . . . Macs are touted as being these perfect machines. And they aren't. Or at least . . . mine isn't. I don't know why I would expect any computer owned by me to be perfect, but I confess I sort of had that in the back of my mind.

What I have discovered instead, however, is that Mack, my generally cooperative Macbook, likes to snack on CD-ROMs. Sometimes they get stuck. When that happens, I have to shut him down unceremoniously and turn him back on and hope he will release the disk without any more fighting. Usually he does.

Today I bought the 2008 version of TaxCut, which I always use. I inserted the disk. It got stuck. I shut down the computer. I turned on the computer. I ejected the disk. But I still wanted to do my taxes, so I re-inserted the disk. I installed the software. I ejected the disk. Then the software wouldn't run properly. The whole system got stuck. I shut the computer down again. I turned it back on again. This process (minus the disk, now that the software was supposedly installe) repeated about three times. Finally I decided to return the software and give up for the night. It's not April yet.

I turned the computer back on. I inserted a music disk so I could copy some files. ITunes opened with a horrifying error message to the effect that it couldn't locate my music library because my music library had been damaged. I think I had three days worth of songs on there. I had not backed up my ipod in some time. My itunes library is nowhere to be found.

I called the Milk Guy, more for moral support than because I thought he could fix it; he hasn't had a Mac in years. He said, "It sounds like the computer tried to upload the programme into itunes and it messed up the whole system." Yep. I think he's right. I just . . . couldn't be more frustrated right now.

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