My Headache is Not Over

The tale about my deceased Mac continues. After they replaced the hard drive, we picked it up yesterday. We hooked it back up in my office, and I proceeded with the Time Machine restoration from the dedicated external hard drive. With a firewire connection (faster than USB), it took 7 hours to complete. At the end, I permitted myself to edge into a smile when I saw the "successful transfer" message on the screen. I actually took a photo of it, LOL, in the hopes of using it for a post.

But I am enough of a realist to know that I wasn't completely out of the woods - or safely off of the rock in the middle of a raging river. My desktop actually appeared, similar to what it used to look like when all was right with my digital world on Friday night. But there were some curious broken application links in the dock at the bottom of the screen. Okay, I thought. I can just redo the links on the dock. So I clicked the mouse...

The "white screen of death" returned.

At this point, I don't mind sharing with you that I was upset, times ten however many digits there are in our current national debt. I called Apple Care again. A nice young man (who spoke English!) walked me through various keyboard acrobatics. At times, I got strange colored screens (one green and one blue) that looked like digital corduroy. At least I had something new to look at besides the plain white color, right?  The disc drive wouldn't even vacuum in the DVD startup disk that originally came with the computer. The bottom line was that my Mac had returned to its assumed state of being an extremely oversized night light. We were given another appointment at the Genius Bar today.

I did a little research on the laptop and unscientifically concluded (since I only speak "camera" and not "computer") that there was either a graphics card failure, logic board failure, or both. I must be getting pretty talented with Google searches.  The Genius Bar lady who was assigned to me today ran the diagnostics and said it looked like failures of both components.

Apple is now eating another $1002 outlay on top of the $265 sunk cost for the hard drive replacement. And, there is no telling whether this will be the end of the reconstruction. We made it clear to Miz Genius Bar lady that everyone's collective goal should be for us not to have to return for a third repair. She recognized the wild and feisty looks in our senior eyes, and she readily agreed. They are going to do extensive diagnostics to ensure that this time they will fix it, once and for all.

Folks, this is exactly why it pays to cough up the extra dough for computer insurance. Because if I was looking at spending this kind of money (not to mention aggravation, trips to the dreaded mall, and time), I would be raising the surrender flag and getting a new computer. I even told Miz Genius Bar lady that Apple would be spending less money on the whole deal if they just handed over a new one to me right now. Unfortunately, she didn't bite on that suggestion. Drats!

Here's the bottom line. I'm still using Mr. Jim's laptop and will continue accessing it for an undetermined amount of time. Our Apple store didn't have the supercharged graphics card in stock that I had gotten as an extra when the computer was new. The card has to be shipped from a warehouse. Maybe my computer will be ready for me to pick up in a couple of days.  Maybe not. Who knows anymore.

Because I have now gone full-tilt paranoid (current motto: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong), I'm making a copy of the entire Time Machine onto another external hard drive. (This crazy gal has multiple external drives with 10 TB total storage capacity. But most of my edited original photos end up being around 1GB in size, so I'm not entirely pegged out on the wacko meter when it comes to storage capacity.) Once the backup of the Time Machine is done, I plan to copy off some older RAW photo files and do some editing using Mr. Jim's Mac desktop. He has all of the photo editing software that I need. So - fingers crossed - I may be able to post up a Wordless Wednesday photo tomorrow and actually participate in my own photo challenge this Saturday. They won't be the photos that I originally planned to present. But I'm sure I can scrounge up a few morsels out of my archives.  I would sure hate to miss a photo party that I am hosting!

I'm way behind on visiting my many blogging friends. Continuation of the computer saga and next Tuesday's cataract surgery will slow me down even further. If you get a blog comment from me in the couple of weeks, consider yourself blessed -  or cursed - whichever the case may be, LOL!

P.S. Thank you so much for the prayers for both of us. I am so grateful for all the encouraging comments and e-mails that get directed my way. Mr. Jim continues in his efforts to rally and deal with all of his doctor appointments/treatments.  And I'm still waiting for my second round of antibiotics to kick in with some vigor and kick the sinus infection to the curb. "Feisty" remains the watchword at Grey Havens cottage!