Geek is chic?

Today I'm thankful for ...

... Dad introducing me to computers, and that I stuck with them. Lately this stupid Macbook Pro has been giving me tons of problems. It couldn't see its firewire port and it wasn't able to sleep. I tried resetting the NVRAM and PRAM according to many guides on the Internet. I took it to the Apple store and they said I might incur a $300 repair and would be out of a computer for weeks.

That is just not going to work for me.

I use my personal laptop also as my work computer. I have many professional licenses on this machine and I can't easily transfer them off. I have insurmountable deadlines too.

So my solution was to figure out if it's a software issue or a hardware issue. My guess is that it's both: Parallels taking over my firewire port and not letting a process sleep; and an aging hard disk that probably is littered with errors from being bumped while it was writing. I got a new 160GB hard disk (40GB more than what I currently have) and after reading many guides I decided to crack open the Macbook case...

Wow, talk about a bazillion screws. Seriously. I had a strip of tape where I could tack the screws so I could remember what order to put them back in. There's probably 2 dozen mini Phillips and Torx-6 screws! But I did it, ever so gingerly moving ribbon cables and unlocking this and that. With the new HDD connected and a fresh Mac OS X install the computer functioned as good as new, sleeping and all. Now I knew that it was most likely a software problem.

What's more interesting is that I swapped the drives back to my old 120GB and now the computer sleeps just fine too!!! I don't get it! My best guess is that jostling the laptop around loosened something and one day when I slept the computer while my Mighty Mouse was on probably put it into a weird power state. By taking out the RAM and swapping the hard drive I think that helped to reset any stuck bits, and the fresh Mac OS X install helped cleanse the rest of it.

Anyways, I'm glad that my introduction to technology happened when I was young and I was never discouraged from pursuing it. There are many girls who get frustrated by being too geeky, but sometimes you just have to follow your passion I guess?