I Knew Him, Horatio - Das Übergeek

Das Übergeek

Jun. 14th, 2005 | 03:33 am

meta-creation_date: 6/14/2005 03:33:24

For once, I feel like a true geek. You know, laptop maintenance is a whole lot different that tower/desktop maintenance. For one thing, you actually have room to work in a desktop computer. I’ve never been afraid of nuking anything inside a computer, and I’ve pulled and replaced a lot of hardware in my day.

Ever since I was a kid, my dad had me help with the hardware reviews, and by the time I was eleven or twelve, I was installing major hardware upgrades into testbed machines. He’d just come around when I had the installation and preliminary testing complete, play around with it a bit, and write the review (Macworld).

So being afraid to poke around inside a computer was a new experience for me. Well, for one thing, it was the closest quarters I’ve ever worked in: a vintage PowerBook Titanium G4 (TiBook). And it’s mine. There’s something much less haphazard about working on one’s own heart and soul.

This has been an emotional time for me anyway. My old hard drive (an 18GB Toshiba) just crashed, taking two months worth of files and downloads with it. This drive is a beauty (Seagate 100GB), and there was absolutely nothing that was going to make me mess this one up. (Sounds like dealing with women, doesn’t it?)

After a long and misguided hunt, I finally hunted down a Torx T8 bit. You’d think that it’d be more common, but nearly every set of security bits in my house stopped just shy — T10. Also, we just moved, so most of our stuff is boxed in the garage yet, which doesn’t help much in the way of making things easier to find.

I got the old drive out, and slipped the new little minx in its place, and away we go! There were some tense moments when I wondered if Disk Utility was going to see it or not (it did!), but I got it formatted in ten seconds flat, and now Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) is installing itself onto 4.7GB of my brand-spankin’-new disk space.

I feel much better now that I have bonded more fully with my machine. She may be old, but she’s a great box; and being a Mac, has plenty of spunk left. I just can’t wait to get back to Photoshop, web design (and none of this namby-pamby DreamWeaver or graphical editor junk! I like my text editor just fine, thank you very much!

Vive la Mac! Posted via Passage to Serendipity

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