At Home with John and Debbie

We went to Solihull on Saturday. We had lunch at Wagamama. We bought valentine steak at M&S (having failed to find a proper butcher) and vegetables from a proper greengrocer. But the prime reason for going was so that I could get some audio bits and bobs from Maplin.

I love Maplin. I don’t understand how people spend hours browsing in a clothes shop, but I could spend all day looking at gadgets and tools and bits of wire. Yes, I bought the audio bits I needed, but I also bought some self-adhesive velcro pads, some velcro cable ties, and a USB hub, thinking I could sort out the mess of cables under the desk by the Mac Mini.

So it was that on Saturday afternoon, I emptied months’ worth of accumulated clutter from the alcove where that disk and that Mac live, unplugged it all, then plugged it back together again neatly.  The trailing mains block velcroed to the inside of the desk; cables suspended from the underside; the USB hub suspended from the underside for easy and neat accessibility.

With other stuff tidied as well, I settled back to use the Mac desktop properly for the first time in months (as opposed to my usual practice of clearing a tiny space in which to use the mouse, opening Vuze, looking at it or deleting something, all left-handed while craning round the corner.

First things first: the Mac told me there were updates to install. I told it to get on with it. This involved a reboot. Upon reboot, everything was disturbingly slow. The desktop would freeze up for minutes at a time. I managed to summon up a console. It told me there were disk errors. I found the Disk Tool. It told me my main disk was faulty, and the ‘repair’ button was greyed out.

I tried to boot it from the install DVD. It wouldn’t do it. Every time I tried, it would spit out the DVD, then boot from the hard disk. The more I did this, the less often it would boot, until eventually it wouldn’t boot at all.

So, an excuse to abort this silly Apple lark. Another post, I think, for what happened next.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 14:52 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.