Last year I posted about my mother and how I decided for her new computer that she should buy a Mac Mini. This was mainly a selfish decision on my part since it would allow me to use iChat to share her screen whenever she has a problem she wants me to look at. Such was the case on Saturday night when she called me and wanted to know how to do a few basic things.

As is my wont, I was complaining to a friend of mine about being tech support for a family member when he shared his tale  of family tech support from Saturday. It seems that his father bought an Acer computer and was having some problems. My friend was on the phone with him and was trying to help him download the updated driver and whatnot. As you can imagine, helping a family member (a non computer savvy one at that) to download and install new drivers is not for the faint of heart. In the end it turned out that it wasn’t a driver issue at all.

This is why I decided that my mother get a MacMini instead of a Windows box. I’d much rather be dealing with questions of how to print or email something instead of having to lead her through downloading the latest drivers only to find that they aren’t needed.

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.