2 May 1998: Maybe It's Time to Surrender

Saturday, 2 May 1998:

Maybe It's Time to Surrender

So this morning I turned on my computer not long after I got up and... it didn't boot up.

I checked the disk with Norton Utilities and encountered a B-Tree problem in a different location than usual, and one that Norton was unable to fix. So I hoped it was some small temporary glitch, albeit obviously not a good sign.

A little later I discovered that starting up Nisus Writer was causing a system crash, every time. I'd had some trouble with the installation on my Powerbook earlier this week, but reinstalling it on my PowerCenter made no difference. Turning off extensions, however, did make a difference, so I decided to put in the legwork to see what extension was causing the problem. It didn't take long to determine that it was QuickTime. Sigh.

After some further fiddling I decided to bite the bullet and do a low-level reformat of the drive, with mapping out of bad blocks. (I went and read about ten issues of The Fantastic Four in my Marvel Masterworks hardcovers while this was happening. Fun stuff.) Then I did a data and application restore, and everything seems to be fine now.

But (queue William Shatner vocal mannerisms) FOR HOW LONG?

I would be an idiot to say that I have any confidence that things will stay stable for more than a month. And I briefly talked to a Mac-expert friend of mine tonight and he said, simply, "Sell it". I'm tempted to go try MacOS 8.1 anyway - maybe if I can borrow it from someone to try out - but perhaps it's time to see the writing on the wall. Although these crashes are not fatal (as I said, I haven't been losing data, just time), I'm reluctant to do really important work - especially anything time-critical - on my big machine right now. If I, say, do a zine for my APA I'd need to give myself enough time to do a data restore in case of catastrophe. That's not good.

And I'm running into the problem about once a month, which is long enough that it will be a long time of flawless operation on this machine before I do have confidence in it.

So I pulled out my copy of the latest MacWarehouse catalog just to see what new computers are running lately. I could get a pretty decent G3 Mac for about $2000. (Desktop or tower model? I don't know that the tower would give me anything that I'd actually use. Anyone have any opinions?) And I may be able to sell this machine to someone else, but obviously with the caveat about the problems I've been having. There may be someone willing to take a chance on it. But I wouldn't bank on it.

So, I dunno. I'll think about it. If I'm going to do the house thing, I don't really want to drop that kind of money on a computer right now, but maybe I could tighten my belt in other areas (buying fewer comics from eBay for instance).

What really galls me about this is the guy in the local SF group who has the exact same machine I have, and has not had a whit of trouble with it. Arrgh.

(Meanwhile, all my PC-partisan friends are probably laughing their asses off!)

Bleah.

About the time I finished my computational gyrations, I got a call from my friend Brian who invited me over to his place to play Iron Dragon, a railroading game that uses essentially the same system as Empire Builder but with a fantasy theme. I don't like it as much as the real-world variants (India Rails is due out in a month or two, by the way), but it was fun to play. I came in last, but then it was my first time playing so I don't feel too badly. Actually Brian and I were pretty much tied; his wife Beth just ran away from us early on and we never caught up.

I also got about a third of the way through Einstein's Bridge. The technical physics stuff is pretty dull, I must admit; there's some neat technological trickery, but a lot of textbook explanation of how the Superconducting Supercollider would work (if it existed), and the plot is moving at a glacial pace. I presume it will pick up at some point.

It's rained off-and-on all day, or I would have gone for a bicycle ride. It was good to get out of the house to do that gaming.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)