Eyefood

I am known, widely apparently, for the number of old and deaded Macs that I have a tendency to hoard. I have no idea why I started, but somewhere along the line I decided that these wonderful boxes of potential shouldn’t be thrown away just because a new model came out, and tried to find uses for them all.

I never actually managed that (I tried to get an Ethernet->AppleTalk network working once so that I could use a Mac Classic to read my email, without much success, and my “Apache on a Mac Plus” plan came to absolutely nothing), but, for one reason or another, I seem to have a few of them in this flat that aren’t doing much.

Anyway, bleh, they all seem to have something wrong with them.

The battery on my MacBook Pro gave up the ghost long before I inherited it, and while I’m waiting for a replacement, I have a chain of extension cables attached to it so that I can carry it around the flat without unplugging it.

(Although I invariably manage to clumsily pull out the power cord at just the wrong moments - like half-way through a Skype conversation with Amiee)

Also, the CD/DVD Drive is borked, having been dropped, and I managed to get a CD stuck in it. So everytime I do knock out the power cable and have to restart, it takes about 10 minutes for the Mac to try and spin it up and boot off it, before giving up.

My beautiful little 12″ Powerbook’s hard drive has developed some bad blocks recently (just, coincidentally of course, at the moment when I dropped it at work), and has long periods of freezing while it tries to remember that it can’t use that bit of the disc.

My G3 iBook is still going strong, except that I’m using gaffer tape to keep the CD tray shut, and it’s just not powerful enough to do anything other than looking at four-year-old web pages on.

But (and this is the point of all of this), up until recently I had a trusty iMac here, nicked from work as a ‘replacement’ for my G5 which I took in (because I had no decent machine to work on there). I had this idea that it would be a perfect little home media centre - I was going to plug my EyeTV into it, and set it all up so that it had all our music and TV shows and films on it (all beautifully play-listed in iTues) and we’d be able to access them from anywhere in the flat.

But (again) something went wrong with it a couple of weeks ago, and I found myself desperately trying to rescue six months of work onto an external hard drive from the horrors of Single User Mode. (Hold down ‘Apple-S’ while rebooting, and prepare to completely screw your Mac up)

Ever since then, it’s been a bitch to work with. It freezes every few seconds, and has become hideously unresponsive. I tried to get EyeTV working on it (even upgrading to version 3 - which is stunningly good BTW), but the pauses were just too infuriating to be able to watch anything with.

I have absolutely no idea what is wrong with it. All my usual tricks (like fsck) seem to have no effect whatsoever. I even completely erased and reinstalled the system on it, to no avail. I used to be really good at fixing Macs - back in the days of OS 9 and before. Usually all you had to do was take out the odd Extension or Control Panel, and things would be zippy again.

Also. The hard disk I resuced everything onto, has stopped spinning up. This worries me.

Tags: mac, maintenance