Roadkill on the information superhighway

My computer stinks like a flattened ‘possum carcass sizzling on the pavement of a Southern highway.

It’s been almost six months since I attempted to make it awesome by adding more RAM and disk space. It was going to become my portable creative multimedia studio. I actually needed the disk space, to hold some hefty audio software I had just bought (Logic Studio plus Ableton Live, for a total of some 70 or 80 GB). The RAM, I was hoping, would let me edit big audio/video projects with snappy response.

Instead, my computer got sluggish. You know, click the link and wait while the hard drive makes noises and the cursor spins. Spin, spin, spin …. spin … then load the next page. Forget complex multimedia projects; this happens while surfing the web or typing an email.

I finally gave up on Repair Shop A after they looked at it four times (or was it five?) and found nothing. In their defense, the problem comes and goes, and it tended to go away just before I brought it to them.

Now I am on my second visit to Repair Shop B. Last time, they found trouble with my logic board and replaced it (free under a recall program from Apple!). I was really excited about this, but the sluggishness returned quickly. The good thing about Repair Shop B is that they are more interested in a proactive, unit-testing approach. If they cannot find anything wrong this time, we will discuss a strategy such as switching out the hard drive to see if it affects the problem. That way, we will learn something even if there is no smoking gun on the test bench.

Had I known up front that it would take this long, I might have considered buying a new machine back in August. The cost so far has not approached anywhere near the cost of a new MacBook Pro, but five months of delay is certainly worth some dough.

We will see what happens. For now, I am working on the kids’ iMac in the family room. Again.