17 July 2008

Halt!

Today I'm thankful for ...

... my Mac sleeping nearly instantaneously. I was at a club last night for an event where I needed my Mac. In a dark corner and on a very short table ledge I perched the Mac. After I was done with a quick bit of work I closed the lid and started to turn away from it. At that instant the Mac tipped off the ledge and made a sickening smack on the floor. I turned back just in time to see it land on its bottom side.

Holy crap.

I picked it up and looked for initial damage. The right side received a dent because I had a laptop security cable plugged in it and it must have landed on that first. But then it must have tipped flat and the whole bottom side clattered to the floor about the same time. Other than that there is no visible damage.

I powered it up to find that it was in fine working condition, no screen cracks, no case cracks, no broken keys or trackpad controls. Then the moment of truth: would the Mac's operating system report errors? After logging back into the computer ... it was fine! Yes! It appears that as soon as I shut the lid the drive stopped spinning and so the heads were already parked when the laptop smacked the concrete. I know the Mac has an accelerometer to suspend the disk in a fall, but I think the Mac was already asleep before it hit the ground.

Back at home I ran a disk check and things looked a-OK. Whew. I'm so glad I set the Mac to hibernatemode 0.

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