Near Loss, Triumphant Recovery

On Tuesday night, I did something to my iBook and it got very upset. It had stalled when I tried to do too many things at once and when I tried to reset, it hung on the gray apple start up screen spinning indefinitely. No amount of restarts or PRAM zaps would get it back together. I even took out the Airport card and thought I might try to take out the after market memory because I've heard that helps. Unfortunately, I didn't have any after market memory and I continued to be stumped. I was forced to use JR's craptastic PC to search for a cure.

Eventually, I tried some system discs from 10.2 that I had (I had been running 10.3.7). The hardware test disc gave me an error message saying "Invalid Memory" which freaked me out and the system software gave me another error message which told me I had to restart my computer. By this time, I was depressed and distressed. There was nothing to do. I thought of the possibility of losing the majority of my college work and anything I've felt the need to save since then. I imagined losing 4 years of AGP Quicken. I'll write a post on great amounts of material loss soon, where I'll delve into this more deeply.

I did think that maybe system discs for 10.3 might work better and I knew I could get some at work on Wednesday morning. Fala, fala. You can't imagine my glee on Wednesday when I reinstalled the system software and got my computer back. I ended up not fairing too badly. I lost my bookmarks for Safari and my email settings for Mail. Plus, Thunderbird and Firefox seemed to stop working and needed to be reinstalled. I was able to save my Firefox settings, though. The biggest loss was my calendar, but I hadn't used it for much except birthdays, and I always forgot to call people on their special days anyway!

I have an external hard drive, and if anything, this experience will get me to set up some sort of system for backing everything up a couple times a week. That way, the next time my computer decides to die, I'll be ready!