Genius Bar

Since this has becoming CV's Aspect Ratio and Computer Service Blog, I should mention a recent positive service experience, this time with my first encounter with the Apple Genius Bar.

My work MacBook Pro 17" (yeah, I know, sorry) had been acting flaky--strange pauses, incredibly long boot times, and nowhere near the battery life that Apple was advertising. So I made an appointment at the local Genius Bar to see if they could figure it out.

As I was headed there I realized that possibly the Migration Assistant hadn't done quite as good a job as I'd hoped in moving things over to the new computer. Maybe something had been moved over incorrectly, or there was some kind of conflict between older programs and newer ones.

The Genius Bar genius (hee hee) thought similiarly, particularly after rebooting with an external drive showed fine performance and fast boot times. We tried deleting a few things like Parallels, but it didn't seem to help. So he proposed an Archive and Install. I'd have been able to handle that myself but since the Genius Bar was all set up to do so, I let the genius do it and left to hang out at Barnes & Noble. 

After a nice Archive and Install, the machine is fantastic. Nice quick startups and ridiculously long battery life (at least as long as I'm not running TweetDeck... I love those Adobe AIR apps but man are they resource hogs). Yay Genius Bar.

Linux bails out Vista AGAIN

Was using the Mrs.'s HP computer and saw that it wanted to install a Service Pack update. I figured that Microsoft would have had that down by now, so I said go right ahead. Then my daughter tried to use the computer for a school project, and came to tell me that "something was wrong" with it.

Indeed something was wrong--it was blue-screening on startup with one of those darling Windows errors, specifically, "STOP 0x0000C1F5." I Googled it and found a number of messages saying that it was due to (yes) faulty download and/or installation of a Service Pack update, with most of those saying the best solution was to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. Hey, thanks a lot, Microsoft, I owe you one.

Luckily I found one message that suggested booting from a Linux Live CD and deleting a particular directory on the Windows drive. So I burned a copy of GParted, booted from it, opened up a terminal, typed in the magic Linux command line incantations, and restarted. Had some scary moments during repair, with various freezes and error messages and all kinds of CHKDSK repairs, but eventually Vista was indeed back up and running.

I know, I know... you're asking why I didn't just install Linux on the computer. I agree, I should have.