Desktop Demise

This past Monday my old iMac began showing some ominous symptoms, signs which in my experience didn’t bode well. Despite its decrepitude (a seven year-old hard run machine) I wasn’t too eager to add my contribution to the Apple coffers, figuring there were other things the price of a new computer could be channeled into. So, I called up my meager technical skills in a last ditch effort to staunch the drain of life from my old, dependable standby. But those skills were not enough, and I watched late Monday as the final curtain literally came down on the iMac screen. A slowly descending curtain of transparent gray scrolled down the screen, and a message window struggled through to suggest restarting the computer. But I knew the life blood was running thin and at last ebb, that a restart would raise no heartbeat. Sayônara old friend.

On Tuesday morning I put up a post on this blog using the MacBook Pro laptop, then got out my thinning wallet and called the Apple Store. I considered it a good sign that the store rep I spoke to had the same name as Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. The guy (unrelated to the Apple “Woz”) has probably sold a hundred or more Apple computers, still I felt a little bit special buying a new iMac from someone with a name so meaningful in Apple history.

Whether the Apple rep’s name had any significance or not, no one short of Steve Jobs could ask for better service than I got. My order for a new iMac was processed after 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday; the computer was delivered to my door at 11:30 Thursday morning. In other words, it took forty-one hours for my order to be processed, shipped and delivered to my door. In this case, I believe the computer shipped from Pennsylvania. Mr Wozniak, the Apple Store sales rep is in Austin, Texas. Pretty good service by anyone’s standards.

With this iMac I didn’t exactly experience the ‘plug and play’ claim Apple has long made, but that was the fault of no one. I spent an hour running around looking for a new connector cable for my external backup drive. It was essential to copy the files from the deceased iMac onto its successor, and that’s easy enough provided your Firewire plug fits into the slot on the new computer. But standards have changed, so I had to drive to Daytona for an adapter cable.

Once the new iMac was up and running with all the transferred files and system settings—thanks to Apple’s terrific Time Machine software—I ran into problems with the Photoshop Essentials software and spent two hours on the phone with Adobe tech support in New Delhi.

But there is now new, vibrant and lightning fast widescreen life on my work table and I feel the exhilaration. Especially thrilled with the HD resolution of the iMac screen. What a huge difference in the screen resolution of then and now.