My Computers are Working Against Me

I am sure anyone who actually reads our blog is tired of hearing about it, just as I am extremely tired of writing about it. Yet another hard drive has bitten the dust, has fallen victim to living in our apartment... it has abandoned us.

Our Mac, who I mistakenly praised a couple of weeks ago, has once died again. I was simply updating our blog. It froze, and it has not come back since. All we get now is a blank grey screen, and sometimes it gives us a little circle with a line through it (which can never be good). Also, it is making a clicking sound just like it did the last time the hard drive needed replaced. I have tried all the little tricks my brother can help me come up with, but nothing. Also, unlike in the US, when this country has some sort of holiday the Mac support offices close for days and days at a time, so I decided to bite the bullet and make the international phone call to the Mac offices in the US. Their offices were open on Good Friday, but after waiting for 5 minutes I was unceremoniously disconnected. This was a low-point in my day for sure.

Here is our predicament. The Mac was our primary computer, when it crashed the second time last year we decided to get a back-up computer, our Dell. Our Dell has now crashed twice and is awaiting a new hard drive. So, where does that leave us since both our primary computer and our back-up computer are out of commission? I am typing on my Dell Inspiron 5100 that I bought in August 2003, and to think I almost did not bring it with me.

We treat this computer like a fragile piece of work. We do not load programs on it. We absolutely do not attempt to watch videos on it. We do not surf the internet (um, maybe except to update our blog), and we delete anything from it that is not necessary. Last year when our Mac crashed the second time I tried to load our camera software on it. It of course froze, and it took about 5 attempts to even get the thing to start back up. Lesson learned.

Also, do any of you know anything about the Mac warranties? I am really asking for input. Our hard drive was replaced free of charge last year because we bought a 2 year Apple Care. However, it has been more than two years now, but it has been less than a year since they gave us a new hard drive. Do you think we got any kind of warranty with the new hard drive?

We do not know why our computers chornically crash. In the 8 years I was a computer owner before I came overseas, I never once had a computer crash, and now we are assaulted with them on a quarterly basis. Someone said something about power surges in our apartment possibly being the culprit, but everything else electrical in our apartment is fine; I am so confused. Maybe the huge power plants we live between have some sort of magnetic pull that messes everything up.

Regardless, unless Mac graciously fixes our computer for free, we will not be posting any photos on our blog until sometime in June when our new Dell hard drive makes its way to us. For the grandparents that also includes no Skype phone calls. Sorry.