Yes, its finally happened…. my Macbook Pro died on me. Being suspicious of Apple’s optimistic marketing, I am not surprised. I am surprised at how spectacularly it did break down however! With a PC you will usually encounter problems with speed, viruses and files getting corrupted after a few months. My Mac has been good for the past year, but I think its been saving it up!

Basically you switch it on and the grey start up screen has a little folder on it with a cute flashing question mark. An impression is immediately cast on you that this is not good! You start panicking and switching it on and off repeatedly for about ten minutes.

This ‘cute little question mark’ can mean that the computer has misplaced the start-up files. Well thats what will happen if your lucky – and in that case you can tell it where they are. What it will usually mean is that your hard drive is fudged. That is to say, you cannot start your beloved Macbook – forget about it.

If your an extremely short tempered person you will grab the nearest pen and plunge it through the screen like a jack hammer until your rage is satisfied. On the other hand, you could phone the nice Irish Apples and ask them for some help. My warning is to go slowly on them – remember their stuck in an office with a script and a ‘I can do Mac Repair’ book. If you don’t let them go through their little tick boxes they simply don’t have any more a clue than you do.

So basically, after you let them go through their tick boxes they will tell you your hard drive is fudged. Just like I did. You will ask them in a shrieky and shaky voice whether all of your precious files are gone forever. They will try to calm you and say “its certainly possible”….. but you know you won’t ever get it back….

You could skip the Irish Apples and take it straight to an I-can-do-Apple Repair shop. They will probably take one or two weeks to replace the hard drive in your Mac. If your not daft you’ll have Apple Care, which will cover the costs. If not……… serves your right for being so optimistic!

I’ve lost my holiday photos and a pretty important project I was working on for Uni, so I’m a little angry about the whole thing. Do you know the funniest part though? Its Apple’s fault. They bought screwy hard drives off some Chinese people (Seagate) and knew about the problem, but didn’t recall anything.

Basically the Read/ Write heads on the hard drives are prone to randomly breaking off, making recovery impossible. If your reading this before a problem occurs (and I can’t stress this enough) – BACK UP YOUR FILES!!!!

Oh well happy days…….