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The End of An (Albeit Short...) Era

So I only have a little over a month left of school, and since being a student gives me the benefit of a student discount I figured I would take advantage of what little time I had to get the few things I would need after graduation. One of the things I’ve wanted was to upgrade from Mac’s Tiger OS to the new OS, Leopard, which I missed by about three months when I bought my beloved MacBook Pro last summer.

So I got the OS disc delivered via FedEx just yesterday, and decided to take the time to run the upgrade in the afternoon so I could do some homework tomorrow night, after everyone was in bed, the standard operating procedure since I’ve been in school.

Before I go on, let me add that in the past month or two my MacBook has been starting up slow, and despite following the advice I got from my friend (and fellow MacBook owner) Dave to check my permissions, it still ran slow. I had gotten used to the inconvenience -- heck, I’ve been a PC user for a few years now and was used to minor issues. The Mac should be better than that, but hey, who knew?

So anyway, I backed everything important up (homework files, work files, pictures and videos), and started running the upgrade.

And got an error. Basically my Mac was telling me I had to erase my hard drive completely in order to install Leopard. I wasn’t sure about that idea, I know I had backed everything up, but I didn’t think that, since I was running on the highest level of Tiger available (which should just be able to upgrade without erasing), I shouldn’t get that sort of error.

So I called AppleCare, which was a totally divine inspiration for me to purchase when I got the computer, and after spending an hour on the phone with some most excellent tech support guys, I ended up driving the forty minutes or so to the closest Apple Store so they could basically retrieve my data, wipe the drive and run the upgrade to Leopard.

Or so I thought. After running a diagnostic, my friendly neighborhood MacGenius Kevin, discovered that, essentially, my Beloved MacBook Pro’s hard drive was, kaput. Dead. Out of order forever.

Thankfully I’m under warranty. But they had to keep it overnight to replace the drive, possibly until Wednesday at the latest. And that just stinks. I’ve got a bunch of homework to finish by then, so I’m hoping that they’ll be able to get it back to me by tomorrow night (which is possible, at least they said it was possible.), so I can catch up on all of the work I missed over the weekend.

But hey, there’s a few things I’m totally thankful for:

1) Out of pure instinct and due to a couple of bad moves in the past, I backed up the important stuff.
2) I bought AppleCare, which will no doubt save my butt a couple more times in the three years total that I will have it.
3) I live in an area with not one but TWO Apple stores within driving distance. If I couldn’t get in at the Victor store, I could have drove the other direction to get into the one in Buffalo.

But mostly, I’m glad I backed up. I know I should do it more often, hopefully this will be a reminder that I need to do just that once I get my MacBook back. And maybe I’ll get one of those external hard drives I’ve been wanting for a while. Think they sell those with a student discount somewhere?

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