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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