Evil Tech
Does this look familiar?
I use a mac, and knock on wood, have never had a wack-o melt down. Once, my old mac laptop computer (“Martha”) overheated… but I din’t lose anything. I back up stuff now on an external drive… but I admit I don’t do it often enough.
With computers we deal with problems we wouldn’t have in the first hand without them. ^^
Yeah, I’ve given up on Windows for doing serious work. I use it for entertainment only these days. My work machine is an Ubuntu computer.
Computer problems have certainly make MY career. I’ve been an IT professional since 1984. Computers are much like everything else: We take them for granted when they’re doing their job, and cuss at them and wail our woes when they don’t. And I have YET to come across a user whose computer has crashed (PC or MAC) and when I asked them when they made their last backup, they just stare blankly at me.
The owner of our company once sent a Broadway playwright to me. (Yeah, as in Broadway, NYC. She already had an award winning Broadway play.) She’d spilled Coke on her notebook and it had shorted out, wiping out her new play. No backup other than a printed copy. I’ve always wondered how much the play changed when she was re-typing it into her new notebook.
I hope Ryan kept a copy of his work on a memory key or something. (I have no fewer than four copies of my novels, not counting the copies my publisher has.)
Argh! First three rules of computing: backup, backup, backup…
My poor laptop doesn’t even get the luxury of a shut-down – it just shuts off. Turns out the poor thing was over-heating (max safe temp is 194°F – it got to 210°!). Now I’ve got a program to keep an eye on it, so I can stop what I’m doing… Eventually, I’ll buy her a new motherboard *sigh*
I currently use a Mac mini with a Windows XP partition. I don’t know whether my Windows partition has ever crashed, but it has been known to restart spontaneously.
Mac OS X is my default operating system, though. Last week, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and … let’s just thank Apple for not code-naming it Cheetah.
I curse Microsoft for its rapacious overreaching and Apple for its snobby standoffishness. Both are guilty of gilding the lily by larding their systems with bloatware; flashy window dressing and counterintuitive front-end complexity that unnecessarily strains their hardware and their user’s learning curve. A pox on both their houses!
How fatal? There are degrees of dead …?
Yes, Crow… “Fatal” has degrees… is the computer just temporarily dead? or down for the count?
Astragali: your computer issues would make me nervous.
And what’s a Ubuntu? Sounds like a computer made in the jungle.
Pete: Um, that’s a sad story… always keep the beverages away from the hardware! Especially if you have cats!!!!
I love my Mac…. then again, I loved my Toyota, too… Often times, my attachments to certain brands let me down… Converse is made overseas (by Nike no less)… Toyotas have become “less-than” (safe… honest… etc), York Peppermint Patties moved their operations to Mexico… I am waiting for Mac to let me down somehow… perhaps since they’ve been fudging their ipad sales numbers, the slide has already begun.
Oh Brig, I’m not suprised you use a Mac :). How artsy of you~
I have a PC, I’m really used to them. I’m not sure how I’ll handle a switch, but I’ll have to in college because the course I’m taking only uses Macs. Le sigh, such discrimination!
I feel for Ryan. My old computer(and when I say old, I mean old. I said farewell two years ago but it was still on Windows ME) would only handle 25 pageviews on certain sites(read: my favourite sites) before freezing up. I had to reboot about five times a day. And it would randomly sign me out of msn, load slowly, etc. etc. I’m so happy to have a new one!
But I still back up important stuff on disc or paper. Hopefully Ryan did the same.
poor Ryan. I too have almost lost stories I was working.
but I didn’t, thanks to auto-recover! 😀
Well, all I know about macs, is that my sister was able to get a virus on one.
Go figure.
Brig: My computer issues make me nervous. But if I get stuck, they should also be able to make me a nice cup of tea, just by standing my mug directly on the keyboard (when life hands you lemons… 🙂 )
As for Ubuntu, it’s a version of Linux that is intended to be more user-friendly than other versions. It succeeds to an extent – and in the case of some games, they run with better frame rates than in Windows 🙂 (Less processor overhead, I suspect)