by aaron on August 19, 2009
I’m here in National Harbor, MD attending a conference, the place is just breath taking in its design although the hotel is pretty much the only thing out here right now. From the looks of it they are trying to build a little town around the hotel. I don’t know how that will go but in this economy it looks like a big risk.
Speaking of big risks, I took one when I went on this trip and didn’t bring with me an install disk of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). To be honest, I usually don’t do this since my laptop is usually rock solid. Yesterday however, it gave up the ghost. The laptop will boot up and I’ll get to the log in screen but when I try to log in I get the “spinning beachball of doom”, and it just sits there for hours if I would let it.
I was able to do some diagnostics on the physical hard drive (thanks to a co-worker that had a bootable external drive) and although there were some errors, they were repairable and I thought that the worst was over. But when I started up the laptop again, I ran into the same problem as before, leading me to believe that it is my OS which got corrupted and not my hard drive that is the problem.
As fortune would have it, I’m in the technology business and I am planning on going to lunch with one of my local partners in the D.C. metro area and they have offered to bring an install disk with them so I can reinstall. I also had another local partner offer to bring one over to me since he lives about 10 miles away.
Regardless of those facts, the lesson has been learned and I won’t be going anywhere again with out an install DVD. An ounce of prevention is really worth a pound of cure.
Most of us who like technology have been in this position one time or another, giving out technical support for family members. Usually it would wind up like the beginning of this scenario.
Color me surprised when my mother told me that she ordered DSL for her home and she wanted me to get her computer (circa 2001) hooked up to the DSL modem. That was an experience that I wasn’t looking forward to in any way shape or form. Then an idea came to me, if I was going to have to support her computer, why not give her a computer that would be easy to support. And, if I needed to see what was on her monitor it would be easy to do so? It sounded like a good idea to me and so I bought my mother a MacMini.
Sunday I went over to her house and set up the MacMini. The first thing I did (after I turned it on) was set up my mom with an iChat account via AIM and signed her into iChat and that was all I needed to get the screen sharing done. After that I installed NeoOffice so she could write papers and other word processing goodness. She was already used to OpenOffice from her old job so it is a seamless transition. I then took care of all the other stuff like setting up her printer and showing her how to use Safari as her web browser.
The only thing that I wasn’t able to set up (for technical reasons) was her email account on the benedictfamily.org domain and set up Mail.app. I set the account up last night and then I was able to set up her email account using iChat and the screen sharing ability that is baked into the application. Then later in the day, she called and I was able to walk her through another question she had.
I’m glad I made the right decision.