Fwd: Macs Again [was: Re: Old Hardware]

[Lynn Newton]

I read Kurt's unabashed rave review of Mac OS with mixed emotions.

First of all, I'm a 25-year Unix guy. My current main workhorse is an AMD64
based PC assembled from parts, running SuSE 9.2. I don't have time to be
constantly playing with distros, so I don't, but would like to upgrade someday
before long.

I also have a G4 iMac that's three or four years old and works flawlessly,
and by coincidence, I bought myself a Macbook Pro just last week. I've
never had a laptop or gone wireless before, so yesterday I popped over
to Fry's to pick up a Linksys wireless-N router. On this I will also be running
some distro of Linux and maybe also Windows, though I need Windows
almost not at all. (I'll use VMware.) This machine will enable me to work
in the living room during the summer, when it gets close to 90 in my
office no matter where I set the thermometer for the house. (I presently
work at home.) I'll also use it for fun.

While at Fry's, I picked up an internal USB PCI card for my PC because for
some reason my built-in USB seems to have gone belly up ... it's been months
ago, and all this time I haven't been able to make a backup. (Well I suppose
I *should* have made them with with scp or something to a space on the
external drive on my iMac, but I haven't been doing that.)

So I got it home, tore into my computer, which I've not had the top off of
for close to two years, blew the dust out, popped in the PCI card (the
manufacturer neglected to supply me one of those tiny screws, no doubt
figuring *everybody* has *buckets* of them, and indeed I used to, but
could not lay my hands on one), put it together turned it on, and it
said I don't have a boot drive. What the???

Well, to make a very long story slightly shorter ... everyone knows what the
drill is when a piece of hardware doesn't work ... I found the card wasn't
seated right, so maybe that was messing up something else, and I
managed to find another screw that went into the hole, though it's
way too long, but will do for now, tested it this time still on the floor
with the lid off, it came up, it saw my external card reader, I plugged in
an SD card reader with a camera chip in it, it mounted right away,
I could see the images, everything looked good, I then plugged in
my external drive (while it was still booted, because it should just
plug and play), and found my computer was dead. Sigh.

Took it out of there, it still wouldn't reboot, removed the SD card, it
still wouldn't see the disk drive, removed the PCI card entirely, it
still wouldn't see the disk drive.

So here I sit, trying to decide what to do next. All the connections
look tight. (It's a SATA drive, BTW.) There are a couple of those
dingly little connectors waving around in the breeze of the type
there's a billion of ... they both say HDD LED ... I don't know exactly
where they go, or if in fact they were ever connected, or even
need to be, but they certainly don't have any bearing on why my
computer doesn't see the main drive. (The BIOS says the same.)

For that matter, I don't see how adding the card has anything to
do with not seeing the drive, because they don't have anything to
do with each other. It's like when you turn on your car radio and
the fender falls off, and you try to explain that to your mechanic
as if there's an obvious cause and effect.

Whereas last night's job was to first add a gig of RAM to my Macbook Pro
(which was successful) and then reconfigure my net with the new
router, the diversion to "fix" my PC, which worked perfectly except
for the USB bus, took all evening, and left me with a computer that
thinks it doesn't have a disk drive and I can't figure out why.

I'm a software guy who has worked nearly 20 years for hardware
companies (among other things), and have concluded this kind
of misbehavior is typical of what happens with PCs. I've never
had this kind of hardware problem with any of the Macs I've owned.

I don't know if there's a point to this. I just needed to vent because
I'm about ready to throw the $#@! thing through the window.

-- 
Lynn Newton
Phoenix, AZ