photo credit: Time for a nap via photopin (license)
My computer died Sunday morning.
Well, most of the computer is probably still fine. Certainly the keyboard and mouse and monitor and speakers and external hard drive are working as well as ever. And I suspect the internal hard drive is fine, too.
But the eensy-weensy bits of video hardware/software embedded in the CPU chip are toast. Which means that I cannot use the computer.
::sob::
Smokey did some research online for me and found that, while not common, this failure is not unheard-of. It is fixable but not cheaply nor easily. All the easy troubleshooting — swapping out cables, rebooting, trying a different monitor — has already been done by others, and we know it didn’t work.
I bought this Mac Mini used about a year ago. Now I know that I should have bit the bullet and laid out a few hundred more dollars and gotten a new one. Which I will probably do later this week.
In the meantime I am reliant ton Smokey’s El Cheapo desktop running Windows 7.0 and my iPad and phone, so I am not completely cut off from the interwebs,. but I am cut off from a fair bit of my data. The upside is that all this happened AFTER the election (12 days previously) and AFTER I got our taxes done and efiled (Friday night) and made all the signs and other printed material for the grand opening of our county party’s campaign office and headquaters (Saturday). Actually, I have a lot of my data in Dropbox.
All this is to say that I may or may not be posting this week. And if any of you have a few hundred spare dollars lying around, send them my way 😉
kmkat & her kneedles 
Technology is just great, until it does not work.
Buying use electronics has never, ever worked out well for me. Sorry to hear it didn’t work out for you, either.
I am sorry. What a pain. . .
Get a good-sized thumb drive, say 32 gig. Download Linux Ubuntu (it’s free). Plug it into your old computer and boot it to the thumb drive. The old hard drive should be available. My friend the computer man uses the system to retrieve files for people all the time.
Having just had to replace my computer, I hear ya, sister. I’m glad I had as much in Dropbox as I did, but I’m still hoping youngest daughter, the computer whizkid, can rescue the rest of my data…
Good luck!
It is a sign from beyond that I should take the time to do a backup. I am not far from the “resort to old Windows 7 laptop/mortgage my daughter’s kidneys for a new Mac” dilemma myself. Is that where the missing post went?
It’s an inconvenience at best and a big expense at work. Good luck with the process of replacing your Mac.
oh yes this happened to us earlier in the year. So sorry!
Oy …even with stuff in Dropbox, what a pain. I have an external back up drive that went wonky a couple of weeks ago. That had me worried. Bought a new one and can at least get to the stuff on the old. I’ll keep Tamar’s tip in mind for the future. Hope you get it all back.