| Joined: | Tue Apr 17th, 2012 |
| Location: | Flower Mound, Texas USA |
| Posts: | 39 |
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A month or so ago, I'm sitting in my easy chair working on something on my MBP when up pops a message that there are updates. Well, I don't give it a thought (not like I would on a PC) and tell it to go ahead and apply them. It does and unfortunately, after it tries a reboot, it fails, complaining about the ACPI driver. Can't get it to boot. Bummer (an I have to say, this is completely unexpected and unusual). So I hold down the Option key and boot the machine to the recovery partition, put in my thumb drive with Lion on it and tell it to go ahead and install. I then went to bed, figuring in the morning I would be pulling backups out of Time Machine. When I get up, the machine is done (no idea how long it took but couldn't have been all that long, I usually only sleep maybe 6 hours). But not only is the OS ok, but all my data and applications are still in place; not a single thing lost! Has worked perfectly ever since.
Steve Jobs used to say about the Macs "it just works". And I really appreciate that, since I want to use a computer, not deal with fixing the operating system all the time (I'm a project manager and I can tell you I get quite enough of that in my work day). But what I've found with this little experience is that even when it doesn't work, it just works. And that's even more impressive.
So now to the PC part of my story. Yesterday we decide to put a faster network card in my wife's PC (she hasn't made the Mac migration yet but I'll say that's pretty soon now). We put in the NIC and "Oh, sorry, you'll have to install SP3 before we can install the drivers". Well, that sucks, but I've got SP3 on my build server in the house, so no problem. Low and behold, after the update, guess what? The machine doesn't boot because of a corrupted ACPI driver (among a long list of others, I might add). Now I can probably fix this, but I know it will take me hours and hours and hours and I just don't feel like dealing with a substandard command line (don't get me wrong, I spend plenty of time at the command line on my Macs, but that's UNIX, not DOS trash). The recovery partition isn't much help since it wants to just restore the whole OS, thereby losing all her data that hasn't had a backup this week.
Well, given I work for a PC manufacturer, I happen to have some PCs laying around unused and my wife's machine is overdue for an upgrade anyway. So grabbed one of the better PCs (i7 quad core 2.8GHz) and slap a new copy of Windows 7 (yuck) on it. Yank the disk out of her old machine and cable it up to a USB converter and drag over all her files, install Office and then clean up any oddities. So she's back in business. And it only took me maybe 6 hours total. As contrasted to the 5 minutes it took me to do a recovery from the same type of error on my MBP. Hmmmm.
In any case, that's the last PC my wife gets. Her next machine will be a Mac. I really don't have time or interest in nursemaiding Windows any more. It's just not fun.
Rob
Last edited on Sun Jul 15th, 2012 18:26 by rmoser