I may be gone sometime......

[Sa Skimrande]

Yippee I expect to hear but that is just me negative as usual, but I may be gone sometime, the reason I am using a Macbook Pro and yesterday the charger died and so I have been eeking out the dying battery which isn't bad on Mac where one gets about six hours use, but checking the cost of a new charger I find I can't afford, so I have the faulty charger in bits, I think I have identified the fault and so all that remains now is for myself to go out and buy solder as I can't find the stuff I had, and hope what I found is the fault after the repair, because if it's not I am stuffed as regards the Mac.

 

But all is not lost I have a basket case pc with no keyboard, mouse and a cracked screen, I have not powered it up in over a year, it might work if I plug in an external keyboard and mouse, but it will be very basic with the horrors of running Vista again.

 

Macs are beautiful machines so user friendly but they do have problems some of which Apple refuses to acknowledge and they keep on the selling the things with the fault, but my issue is the power cord, where PC's fail internally, Mac's fail externally as their magsafe power supplies are flakey at best. But this one has lasted over a year and it is my second one in three years of Mac ownership where before I could afford to replace now i cannot, so it is kill or cure, attempt to repair what most say can't be repaired, it is my only option to get on line without the minging PC where nothing on it works as the DVD drive died after the first year of ownership and that was a business machine made by HP, so should have been a bit better able than the usual fayre, but it wasn't and so HP are off my list of good machines.

[Mannify]

Definitely no 'yippee', Sa Skimrande. 'Puter problems are such a bloomin' pain, aren't they?

[A-S warrior]

Good stuff. Not that your going, but i feel time away will do wonders for you. Although having said that, don't be gone too long.

[Willow-Tree]

good luck with the computer repair.

[Sa Skimrande]

I'm back, I couldn't survive without my social life, it turned out what I thought the fault was, was and so it's repaired sort of in that it works, but it's not pretty due to the non eutectic lead free solder I was forced to use, the join is not fab and not up to my usual standards and the heat I had to use to make the thing stick worried me due to PCB's not liking that kind of heat.

 

I will have to do it again at some point when I can get hold of some good old fashioned eutectic solder if I can given it is a formulation of tin and lead. But I had to make a copper tip for the lousy Black Spur soldering gun first and how I missed my old Weller soldering guns, two of which I lost when my marriage broke up along with about £4k worth of tools- a business in a box, what I used to do as a repair anything repairman.

 

But deprived of the computer I got loads done. Oh and I discovered why my internet was so slow, Google Chrome was the problem, so back to Firefox again.

[robert7111a]

Just shows how we rely on computers now. I rely heavily on mine to do my RAW processing (Sa Simrande will appreciate this...). But a couple of months ago, my PC got some trojan which meant I couldn't do anything beyond powering it up on my login - fortunately it worked on my wife's login. The Internet helped me here as I downloaded some stuff to remove the trojan. Although I back up my stuff regularly, bits like itunes etc I do not back up so I spent a day backing up literally everything in case the problem arose again. Usually I am paranoid about backing stuff up (as I take rather a lot of pictures).

[Sa Skimrande]

Ah my work process is off the memory card and burned to DVD straight away and the memory card only reformatted after the DVD is proved and any work photoshop and such, well always photoshop, the finished images get transferred to an external hard drive to start with and burned onto DVD after that as I have an archival quality zip file with all my discs in it with contact sheets for whats on the discs and the discs are archival quality or Verbatim at least. I do not trust computers not even the Mac with my images which is far more stable than any pc I have owned.

 

But although I do have an anti virus software package on the Mac, it never gets attacked with anything, whee the pc's I have had always got attacked and I was forever on techsupportguy.com and majorgeeks.com trying to sort the things out, but despite on machine anti virus, trend Housecall the online scanner is good and I used to use that to check the computer scanner.

 

But I have not done any real computer repair in three years since I got the Mac, it just doesn't need it like pc's do.