What makes you happy ?

It needed a cable somewhere, the soundboard, something that sits under the HD and the ribbon at the back which was burned. All replaced and it finally works again. Now I’ll get to see just how much better it should be with 2GB under it’s shiny white surface.

Apparently the mini needed a new soundboard – I knew it was a mistake to ask it to play my music! And I get it back tomorrow. 3 weeks after the event. That is still a very very long time.

One burnt ribbon in the mac mini and it’s taking 3 weeks to fix.
It’s one ribbon.
Amazing amount of time for the simplest of jobs.

The most annoying thing? I’d got two programs in trial and both will now be out of trial and I can’t repeat. Marvellous.

If this was a post about Dell people would tear them to bits for the delay.

For whatever reason you care to use / not use, I for one find using a mouse on a Windows machine to be smoother and just plain better.

Let me use an analogy: There are certain driving games that feel just right – it feels like there is traction, that the response is correct, that the time between action and response is perfect. Gran Turismo / Colin McRae / Mario Kart64 for example. And there are some which just don’t pull it off – Double Dash for example. You can’t quite quantify what is wrong but the experience feels wrong.
That’s how I feel with the Mac mouse control – and I’m using the Logitech MX Revo on both.

And this is not an anti-mac thing, it’s just an observation :)

If you lift the top of the Mac Mini off, there is a copper coloured ribbon cable at the back. It looks like it connects the HD to the rest. Mine was burnt. There are several connecting strips and bar those at the end the others had burnt through. So off it goes for repair.

[insert comment that none of my PC's have ever failed, and certainly not like this]

If losing a computer and it’s subsequent effect on productivity is an indication of how important it was (esp when there are other machine around) then the mini was important. There are passwords on there I haven’t got and that alone is a stumbling block. Problem is because I cleared all information from other machines because they could be used by others – not just family. So there was no trace of the important stuff. Which is good – until you need it. Which adds up to an early trip to the Apple shop tomorrow so the litttle white brick can have whatever surgery is needed.

Take mini to Apple reseller. They fit memory that takes it to 2gb. They test, all is good.
I bring it home, switch on. Start Bon Echo, Xchat, Thunderbird and all is good.
Go gym
Come back to find monitor has no input. Mini light is on but no-one is home. No keypress does anything.
Press the button on the back once.
That killed it.
No light.
It hadn’t moved at all from working to not. But it’s dead.
Maybe it’s so overwhelmed with getting some decent memory it’s gone to have a lie down.
But it still looks dead.
Not useful, not at all.

What share of the market does the mac have? Well Firefox has the same level of performance compared to the PC. I’ve restarted, shut every other process, done everything I can yet it STILL takes twice as long to open 6 tabs as PC Firefox does to open 10.
When I can work faster than a computer can open tabs then the machine gets in the way.

So as of now, the PC is the main work machine. There can be no other way.

I need to read up on what Virtual memory is, why Mac apps seem to grab massive chunks of it (Terminal took over 340mb of it), what it is and why it makes.things.so.slow. and why I can’t fit 10PB of RAM so the Mini just doesn’t slow down.

XP slows.
Defrag, clean registry. I used to do this ~ 14 days. Not because it slowed, but because I used to keep the system clean and snappy.

OS X slows.
Run Onyx for full tasks. I will be doing this the same ~ 14 days. It has made an amazing difference. More so than the XP stuff.