Sometimes I love my computers. Often I hate them. And I have mixed feelings about the networks and such that my computer consorts with. Yesterday, my early 2011 old MacBook Pro decided it was a good day to die. If that wasn’t bad enough, our internet connection decided it no longer wanted to play either. In the case of our internet connection, it’s probably the Shaw Hitron modem that’s the issue, at least that’s what the Shaw tech guy I talked to in Winnipeg thought when I called on Sunday. It’s not the first time we’ve had issues with our internet connection. A Shaw tech guy (no, not the guy in Winnipeg) is supposed to come out later today to look into the issue, I hope whoever it is can fix the damn thing. Trying to type emails on our phones is almost as frustrating as having the internet connection itself go down. At least we have some communication with the outside world using data on our phones. Our WiFi network is working fine, it just hasn’t found a way to dance with our internet modem.  Oh well. 

As far as computers go, my old MacBook Pro is certainly dead. I operated on it, took its hard drive into My Tech Guys in Courtenay, our local dealer, and were told that it was toast. I was hoping maybe it was just the video card or the mother board but no, the hard drive is kaput as is the battery. I already replaced the keyboard on the thing and a few other parts and that’s my third battery in there, so, now is the time to surrender. I’ve raised the white flag. I give up. No more money to be spent on expensive operations. 

So, what to do? Buy another computer of course. I’m pretty cheap when it comes to buying some things. I really feel that way about electronics. I expect my computers to last at least a tenth as long as me. That’s been the case so far. Our Macs have done very well, actually. We have one old blue iMac that came out in 2002 and it’s still working fine and we have another desktop model Mac that has three hard drives in it and has tons of storage capacity. It’s at least 10 years old. Problem is I can’t pack those around and I often want to pack a computer around. I’m not going to say I need to pack one around, because that wouldn’t be the truth, but I surely want to. I’m retired so needing is a bit of a stretch. I’m mostly in want mode these days. It’s like I need my sleep but I want my computer to be portable. 

Now I have a brand new Mac Air. It’s a solid state computer. No hard disk, just 128 gigabytes of storage. I’m used to more than that, my old MacBook Pro had a terabyte drive, but I can always store photos and videos on our external drives. Problem is, my old dead drive had a lot of files and passwords in it that I would dearly like to have access to now. I wasn’t too worried about it because I have a backup system, but I just tried to access that and wasn’t able to. Yikes! Is it time to panic? Well, maybe not quite yet. It may be that our whole computer universe is waiting for the Shaw tech guy to come and get us plugged back into the world. I hope so. Today will tell. 

Addendum: Josh, the Shaw guy came over yesterday and checked things out here. Turns out we had too many ethernet connections from the shaw modem to the Apple modem. Easy fix. My bad.

I was able to retrieve everything off my old computer. Now I just have to select the files I want to use. The others can stay on the external drive.

Fun and games.