It apparently is to be a very brief relationship with my new Mac. Problems that started pretty much when I first booted it up but flared in early August have led to a series of tech moves that has made things worse. Now, instead of only randomly powering down, I have startup problems where I get a Matrix-like screen with an increasing number of vertical lines. My because-I-have-to workaround is to zap the PRAM (p-r-alt-command) four times to get it to reboot.
So, I’m two weeks into the semester and the machine I was expecting to get me through an entire degree has stumbled out of the gate. I’m going to spend the weekend backing up files and getting my old laptop, a Windows XP machine without wireless, ready for play. Great waste of a weekend.
sigh …
5 replies on “Sick Mac”
Is it related to the random shutdown problems mentioned here?
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34233
Also see: http://www.macbookrandomshutdown.com/
That’s it exactly. I registered my story with that latter link. Thanks for the tip.
That yielded some results. So far, so good with the suggested fix for my vertical lines problem.
[…] My testing fell short at this point. Since my Mac is still sick, all of my music is trapped elsewhere. I imported a few CD’s that were lying around, enough to create an eclectic playlist, but it doesn’t seem to be recognized by the recommender system. Justin indicated that there were some lags in the network updater, so maybe it will show up where it should tomorrow. In the meantime, this is an example of a playlist network with three spikes representing niche music: […]
[…] Yesterday, at the end of a long week, I got a call from Joshua at the local Apple dealer. “Your Macbook is in.” A few hours later, the latest chapter in the saga of my computer had ended. Despite getting matrix-like lines on my first restart, a web-based suggestion corrected that. Now, fingers are crossed there will be no sequel. (Of course, I tried that before with Back to the Future, and that didn’t work.) […]