Thursday 15 March 2012

RAWHING along to "WAR, what is it good for?"


Wow. What a fortnight

I’m so sorry this hasn't been kept up-to-date. I’ve been collapsing with exhaustion any spare minute I’ve had these past 12 days, it’s been absolutely mental!

My time spent not blogging has instead involved (as well as the usual small boy herding): 5 slogs up to Central London, a visit to the Royal Opera house, lots of lovely meals out and coffees with friends, a fabulous free day out at Legoland Windsor and battling with my piece of crap Mac. Good god have I been at war with my piece of crap Mac. But it’s all fine now, we are friends again. I ordered the upgrade of the operating system as I realised Tiger couldn’t run the Mac App store, and I need the Mac App store to download the applications I need to develop. Doh. I am thrilled with just how cheap as chips Mac’s OS’s are in comparison to Windows by the way, but I suppose if you charge a hefty premium for the hardware, SOMETHING has to be cheaper. The OS Snow Leopard disk arrived and I was super happy until I realised I did not have the required RAM. ARGHH. My Mac was running at 512mb and I needed at least 2GB worth of memory and I wasn’t sure my piece of crap Mac was going to be able to cope with 2GB, It might burn out with that kind of memory! Nevertheless, I thought I’d risk it and ordered myself a twin set of 1GB memory modules. This is normally the point I cry “DAAAAAAAAAD” down the phone and get my father to come over to sort the hardware out for me, but that was going to be problematic as he lives near Walsall. I live in South London. That’s a big old distance. I decided, what the hell, unless I can upgrade the RAM, the Mac will be pretty useless to me, so I might as well try to swap the memory modules myself and not freak out whether or not I was going to break it.

When the memory modules arrived I looked up exactly how the hell one goes around changing memory modules. It can’t be too complicated right? Right?! My first challenge was getting into the correct compartment which proved to be a total ballache. Apple are very helpful with their online ‘how-to’ guides, but they didn’t factor in my limited equipment of a dinner knife and a magic screwdriver. Both of which proved useless. Getting the battery out to get to the correct compartment was easy enough, what was impossible was trying to get the L bracket off that sealed the compartment.  I lamented this fact down the phone to Eddie who suggested I use the screwdriver out of his spectacle repair kit which worked perfectly, thank god for marrying a dude in glasses. Then it was just a simple matter of switching them memory modules over. The old ones slipped out easily enough, but getting the new ones to install was a complete mission. It took ten attempts to get the Mac to recognise them, but recognise them it eventually did once I started to get impatient and jammed them in there REALLY HARD. I’m learning that’s the trick with my Mac, it likes a bit of rough.

Finally with the new RAM capacity in place, getting Snow Leopard to install should be an absolute piece of cake right? Wrong. That took about 4 days, 4 DAYS to get the bloody machine to accept the new operating system. Tears were shed, tantrums were thrown and that was just the Mac. In the end it turned out the PRAM needed resetting… No I’m not entirely sure what this is either, but as of yesterday, I’m FINALLY all good to go. Watch this space! 

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