I HATE APPLE

with the 13" MBP does it come stocked w/2x2GB RAM or 1x4GB?

I already know the answer don't I :'(

2x2 apparently (sez system profiler)

bummer

that 48 GB SSD seems like a great idea

bad idea if you use your expresscard slot for anything else, but http://onethingwell.org/post/977670277/go-ssd

that seems like a really great idea. faster than new MBPs? deal.

i have a 15 inch PB G4, 1.5GHz, 2GB RAM

interesting idea about the SSD card; i definitely never use that slot

is 2gb the maximum ram on those? i would start there (along with some hard drive tidying if things seem slower than they used to be). but yeah, i'd def be thinking about the expresscard thing if i expected to keep this mbp. would be slightly concerned it would complicate backups and day to day use having two partitions. gonna sell this and get an macbook air and walk the effin earth though.

yes it is the max. maybe i shouldn't bother with the expresscard if as you say my HD isn't the bottleneck though.

nothing's really slower than it used to be, apps are just bigger and less efficient with every release.

i HATE apple

my hard drive just died, again, for no reason and out of nowhere. went out for a run and left a cd importing LIKE I ALWAYS DO, came back, screen frozen, computer wouldn't turn back on. tried those weird combinations of keys you press with the start button, none of them worked, one of them made it make an alarming beep and brought up the flashing file/question mark of doom, plus it's making weird clicking noises, so i assume the BARELY FOUR-MONTH-OLD hard drive has died FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. why? why why whyyyyyyyyyy is this? two months out of my warranty, too.

i could totally deal with hard drive failure if it was the result of some stupid thing i did or even a virus, but OUT OF THE BLUE AND FOR NO REASON - i can't deal with that at all. i don't want to hear about how computers "just do" this otherwise i will actually get a hammer and smash every computer i come across until i am actually sectioned. this is so fucking inconvenient this week as well.

i actually think i have a spare HD - from the last time, BARELY FOUR MONTHS AGO, when my computer gave me shit, and the utter cunts at the so-called "genius" "bar" misdiagnosed the problem like three times, replacing my HD when it turned out they needed to replace the fan. i don't think i know how to replace HDs though.

i guess it'd be foolish to hope that the HD hasn't died? i would really like to not have lost various documents (obv not backed up, duh, also stfu).

oh that sucks

lol @ (obv not backed up, duh, also stfu) tho

clicking sound = probably hard drive death. sorry man.

using a hard drive is like parking on the hard shoulder.

xp to tracer: 2GB is ok - my old mb ran on that and it was solid. i was expecting less when you said "pb". since you can't change the g4, expresscard is certainly worth a shot. order one from amazon uk, see if it has any effect and if not then send it back. google around first though and check you can do this with pbs. maybe booting issues for older machines but dunno.

well the thing with backing up is that of course one does it periodically but not EVERY TIME one changes a document or makes a new one

oh god there are a bunch of interviews on that computer that i could really really do with not losing

this doesn't help but if this is true of stuff you change regularly and can't afford to lose or recreate: "well the thing with backing up is that of course one does it periodically but not EVERY TIME one changes a document or makes a new one" you need to change the way you backup. dropbox.

or time machine.

clicking sound = probably hard drive death

but it's only FOUR MONTHS OLD. i mean, i believe you, but it's basically brand new and i actually go out of my way not to bother it - i run the bare minimum of basic applications, no fancy downloads or plug-ins or whatever, i never take risks with downloading anything, i always shut it down completely at night, the HD wasn't anywhere near full, so...whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? if it's totally random and can happen even to a brand new HD, what's the point in taking all that care in the first place? and why can't we get HDs that don't do this?

xp i kept meaning to investigate dropbox, as well as a couple of other options i was told about, but never got round to it :(

i had time machine on that computer but couldn't understand how to get it to work :(

i probably really need to know how best to back up an external HD (which is where all my music is) - is there an online solution for that much data? rather than the unwieldy/expensive route of another external HD?

if it's totally random and can happen even to a brand new HD, what's the point in taking all that care in the first place? and why can't we get HDs that don't do this?

solid state drives, but they are expensive :(

hard drives don't really die for any particular reason. there's just a non zero chance of them failing from normal use. that chance approaches certainty with enough time, but sometimes people just get unlucky. that's what i mean by saying it's like parking on the hard shoulder.

keep this in mind when figuring out how to back up: one day your hard drive _will_ die. if your backup strategy doesn't work in that situation then it's no use. i've probably lost 1/3 of the hard drives i've owned to failure. the other 2/3 i was lucky enough to get rid of before they failed.

take it to someone though. it might not be the hard drive. quickest way to check is to suggest they boot up in "target disk mode" and see if they can read from the drive (at which point you should immediately backup!).

how much music are we talking lex? 50gb? 500?

that is fucking bullshit lex.

lex have you at least tried booting from a CD? if you can get ahold of a system CD and figure out a way to remove the CD that was already in your computer so that you can stick in the system CD, you can start up and hold down "C" (to make it boot from the CD). from there you can run a few tests to see if your HD really is fucked (tho i am sorry to say it sounds like that's very likely)

time machine works by opening system preferences, going to time machine, specifying an external drive that you want to use as your backup (this obviously requires buying an external drive at least as big as your hard drive) and that's it really.

"sometimes people just get unlucky" is what people said the two times before :(

don't know how much music as external HD not plugged into this borrowed laptop, maybe around 300gb?

i keep thinking, if i hadn't gone for that run, it would have been fine

ya time machine is super easy.

also get dropbox going on. make the dropbox folder be a subfolder of documents and just save all your documents subfolders into it. it is the best easiest instant backup ever.

http://b4.crashplan.com/consumer/index.html

I use this service at home and at work and it's wonderful. Highly recommended. Your HD is fairly easy to replace. Just search for the ifixit.com guide for your model and follow the instructions. There will be a video on youtube showing you how to do it. HD's are very cheap. You can get a 500gb drive for under 100bucks. Go ahead the buy a CrashPlan account and it will backup your machine throughout the day in the background and you'll barely know it's there.

128GB SSDs are about £160 now, still very expensive but they have performance and reliability gains. there's some talk that in the next 6 months you'll be able to get double capacity for current prices, ymmv

i got the cd that was in the drive out!

i'm not really sure what the best thing to do if it is fucked is:

- wait til tomorrow eve for gareth to have a poke around himself (i feel uncomfortable trying out things that people suggest unless it's reasonably simple)
- make "genius" bar appointment for tomorrow daytime to see if they have alternative diagnosis/solution (appalling track record last time though) - it's out of warranty but apparently i should be able to make them do it free
- if HD is fucked, do i give the old one i have lying around a go or get a new one? ugh all of this is going to take so much time, i really don't have this much time to spare at the moment :(

Your HD is fairly easy to replace. Just search for the ifixit.com guide for your model and follow the instructions.

the first time my HD crashed, the apple people actually gave me a new HD and told me to put it in myself, on this basis - it did not work out well at all and made me want to stab people with the screwdriver. ideally i'd be able to do it myself so i can test out the old HD but that experience will just make everything even worse.

Also, if it's clicking it's probably dead but i've had good luck using Data Rescue 3 and also Disk Warrior for hard drive recovery. If your data was worth 100 bucks to you, these applications are pretty good and i'd even say essential to have in cases like this.

What kind of computer is it? Is it one of the white plastic macbooks? If so, it's dead easy to swap HD's.

yeah it's one of the white plastic ones

i'm dreading the hours it will take to reconfigure everything to how i like it once this is all fixed, too :(

recreating your ipod folder out of mammoth itunes is the most tedious thing ever

The swap can be done in under 5 minutes. Use coin to open battery lock and remove battery. use screwdriver to remove 3 screws. pull out that L shaped metal piece. grab drive on side by plastic strip. pull out. use Hex screwdriver to remove metal cover. put metal cover on replacement drive. shove it back in. replace L shaped metal piece. replace 3 screws. replace battery.

iirc "shove it back in" was the stumbling block last time - it wouldn't fit properly and i had to take the whole thing, bits and pieces hanging out everywhere, back to the apple store and beg them to do it

midnight while you're stressed out isn't the right time to try it anyway

there are little black rubber pieces on the side of that drive chamber. if it wasn't going in easily you either had the drive cover on the wrong side or one of those rubber pieces came loose and impeded your progress. if the latter, the apple store most likely fixed it for you. I do this kind of thing at work all the time. You can do it. note the orientation of the drive you pull out and make sure you put the cover back on the new drive the same way it was on the other one. shine a light in that chamber and make sure the rubber pieces aren't loose and blocking. those are the only 2 things that could get in the way. i suppose you may not have tightened the hex screws enough but that should go without saying.

Yeah, that's bullshit, but the clicking definitely sounds like HD death -- nothing else in there can click except the disk eject, and that's working OK.

Depending on how vital the stuff that's on there is you could take the drive to data recovery people, but that's v. expensive. Also worth a try if you're up to it is taking the drive out and putting it in the freezer overnight (in a plastic bag). That will often get it back to life one more time, but it's a one-shot deal -- you need to get your stuff off it fast.

(No comfort, but the four months thing isn't unusual -- hard drives usually either fail really early in their lives, or they chug on forever before dying.)

Totally recommend dropbox for future, too. That and an SSD like cozen says. Super-fast, no moving parts and far more reliable.

also get dropbox going on. make the dropbox folder be a subfolder of documents and just save all your documents subfolders into it. it is the best easiest instant backup ever.

― candid gamera (s1ocki), Thursday, October 28, 2010 6:42 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^^THIS^^^^

i use symlinks to add stuff from directories all over home to it, but yeah

what's the point in taking all that care in the first place?

Imo, laptops are made for using. Just be careful not to drop them, be fairly cognizant of obvious malware and such, and back up regularly. Other than that, use the fuck out of it.

i use dropbox, time machine, and until it fell off a table, a hard drive at my parents' place a few hundred miles away.

must have been a 'hard drive' to get to your 'hard drive'

think about how much is that data AND the convenience of being able to work immediately after a fatal hardware problem is worth, and suddenly those external HDs and online backups seem easily worth the money. especially right after it happens and you didn't do anything (this happened to me last year)

stet's right about the HD crash thing, too - my previous internal HD was only about a year old. before that, no hard drive crashes in years and years

yeah geeks have something to describe it - bathtub curve or something?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

anyway that reminds me, my current backup HD is kinda wonky, need to go and buy either a new enclosure for it or a new one altogether

New HD installed. Seems to have sped things up a bit...

I use Time Machine and Super Duper.

I love dropbox but my files are too big to back-up to it.

Hard-drives fail. Generally it's not the computers fault. I will say this, and I've said it before...I have a mac pro and I NEVER turn it off. EVER. I've had it for about 2 years and it's never been off longer then a half hour. Before that I had a G5 that was probably on for 4 years. Back then, I turned it off when I went on vacation during the summer. Came back and the HD crashed on boot. It was physically fine, but had to use Data Rescue and Disk Warrior to get everything off it, format it, then put it back. Then a year later, summer vacation, same thing happened. My theory? With the computer off in a stifling hot room, with no ability for fans to kick in, the heat did something weird. That's my theory at least.

But I have a crazy stupid back-up system now. My main drive has the system and all the apps and this gets backed up via superduper every night. Then I have 2 500gig drives, one is just my music library, the other is just my data, and those get backed up via Time Machine to a 1tb drive. All 5 drives are internal (I'm using the second optical bay for a hard drive).

Not totally smart obviously because there's no offsite back-up. God forbid there's a fire or the computer explodes, I'm fucked. Lately though I've been switching to more cloud computing anyway. Lots of work invoices and other word processing type stuff is on google docs.

Symlinks scare me, but I also don't have a documents folder of any kind. I have a 500 gig drive that's got 200 gigs so far worth of work. So I won't be backing up to the cloud anytime soon.

I recently bought a MacBook Pro for a few reasons and hope to be using it soon at different location. My plan then is to use DropBox to keep it light and backed up/sync'd to the tower. Maybe if I do enough work I'll upgrade to the Pro dropbox. 10 or 20 bucks a month to be able to work on large projects and keep it backed-up and sync'd is a pretty good deal. For reference, the folder for the last Acute CD is over 5 gigs.

been sparsely trying out dropbox but i'd like to start using it more seriously - could people describe their routine and how they combine dropbox with timemachine?

lex have you at least tried booting from a CD? if you can get ahold of a system CD and figure out a way to remove the CD that was already in your computer so that you can stick in the system CD, you can start up and hold down "C" (to make it boot from the CD).

ughhh it won't even boot up from the cd! and now that cd is stuck in there.

Yeah, that's bullshit, but the clicking definitely sounds like HD death -- nothing else in there can click except the disk eject, and that's working OK.

ok: might it be this? because the disc eject isn't working ok. it all started when i left a cd importing, which wouldn't come out - someone on twitter told me to hold down the mouse button while powering up, which got that cd out, but "normal" disk eject definitely not working ok.