We’ve had some electrical problems at my house lately.  Specifically, we’ve had a series of power outages.  When the power goes out, of course my computer goes off.  When it comes back on, my iMac usually loads up everything to where it was when the power went off.  It’s pretty cool.

Well, on January 20, the power went off.  Then it came back on and the Mac started to reboot.  And then the power went off again– right in the middle of that reboot.  Once the power came back on again, the Mac rebooted, but it had crashed.  Big Time.  Unlike a Windows machine, where you would get a blue screen with some code number, on a Mac, you get a screen with some helpful tools that you can use to put your computer to right.  I tried them, but alas, they didn’t work this time.  I tinkered with it for a couple of days, because I’m pretty tech savvy and usually fix my own problems.  I had some upcoming online classes, but I wasn’t worried, because I had my MacBook Air as backup.

So, I went online and scheduled a visit to the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store.  I went in this morning, carrying my Mac in its original box, that I pulled down from the garage rafters and dusted off.  An Apple Genius was waiting for me, and plugged it in at the Genius Bar, right there in the middle of the store, and hooked into the wifi where he had a battery of tools.  In a minute, he had determined that there wasn’t any hardware problem, and had re-imaged the iMac so that it was like a new computer.  I walked out of the store, 20 minutes after entering, having paid NOTHING (and my iMac is a year past warranty).

Now, here is the cool part.  One of the best features of the Mac is Time Machine.  It automatically backs up the computer every hour.  If you accidentally erase a file or misplace it, you can go into Time Machine, find a time when you had that file, and pull it out.  Even better though, is that you can do a full restore like I did this afternoon.  I came home, plugged in my external drive and restored my iMac to where it was just before the power went out.  Even the crap that I had on my desktop was still there.  It even opened the apps that I had open at the time!

I bought my first computer in 1982, and I’ve owned a bunch of them since– around 14 or 15, but I will never own another computer but a Mac.

Well, she is all set up and in her place, ready to help me get started writing and doing whatever else I do on my computer.

It didn’t take me as long to migrate everything over as I thought it would, but I’m still learning some new tricks.

As misfortune would have it, my daughter dropped her laptop the other day and killed it, so she is inheriting my HP.

Here is a picture of the new computer.  She’s sitting in front of the old one.   As you can see, she is still getting settled and I am still getting used to her.