I love Macs. If it was up to me, I would sell my wimpy HP Windows machine and just use the Mac computer.
My machine is a 15” MacBook Pro that is sleek, sexy and fast with graphics that are unbelievable. My sexy Mac was merrily co-existing with me on Snow Leopard OS and we were having a grand old time. No viruses, no “blue screen of death”, no frozen screen, no being taken over by a bot, in fact nothing but good stuff.
Then one day IT happened.
The IT is Lion OS, the latest operating system from Apple.
I went online to the Apple App store, chose Lion OS, paid by credit card ($29), and downloaded it direct from the website: no CD, no DVD, nothing tangible.
Problems started immediately. My Mac would not come out of sleep mode, I had a frozen screen in Safari, it would not shut down, and so on. I went online to see if there was something that I could do to repair the problems. I read that quite a few people had problems after downloading Lion.
Because I had purchased the three-year Apple warranty, I phoned Apple Tech support and screamed help! They walked me through updates, resets, repairs, and dumping library preferences, all to no avail.
The next step was to wipe my hard drive clean and re-install Lion. Pretty drastic, don’t you think?
I phoned Apple and spoke to a supervisor (Katie) about my concerns with wiping my hard drive. She checked with the tech and the senior tech, and they agreed that it had to be done.
They said that there was some sort of conflict going on in my machine. Fortunately the MacBook Pro is running “Time Machine” (backup program) and is connected to an external hard drive.
Well, we wiped the internal hard drive and re-installed Lion. It seemed to work fine. The next day I sat down at my computer, turned it on, clicked on a program and instantly went into freezing mode with the little ball turning and turning on the screen.
I phoned the senior Apple tech, he said that I had to bring the machine to an Apple repair depot to be a “hands on” consultation. I phoned Mac Boutique (the only Apple certified shop in Nanaimo),then we drove over and around to Nanaimo.
I left the machine there, they were going to repair it and send it back to me no charge. Doug at Mac Boutique installed a second version of Lion (the first one was buggy), turned off automatic graphics switching (the Mac has two graphics cards, one better, one lesser and constantly switches depending on the program), installed all the updates and shipped it back to me.
So far, so good. It seems that Lion OS is problematic if it is an update from Snow Leopard but fine if a new Mac is purchased with Lion OS installed.
Thank heaven for the Apple three-year warranty and thank you Katie (supervisor in Texas) for being so wonderful and making things happen.
Any questions? E-mail me at nsilverstone@telus.net.
Norman Silverstone teaches photography through North Island College and Eldercollege in Port
Alberni.
