A couple of days ago, as I was fading into a jet-lag induced foggy sleep, my wife complained that her laptop (A 13″ MacBook Pro, probably 4 years old) was getting slow on email. I knew that it had about 1/3 of the disk free (about 90 gigs) so it wasn’t running out of space.
The next morning came this conversation:
Wife: “Uh, I need DiskWarrior to see if I can make my laptop better.”
Me: “Sure, let me get it for you”
(DiskWarrior is a mac utility that does wonders to fix inconsistent file systems caused by clutter, or entropy over time. It has been a miracle worker in my experience.)
Wife (sheepishly): “Uh, I dropped my laptop a few days ago…”
Me: “Again?”
Result:
- The 4 year old HD that had been dropped at least three times that I know about is dead as dillinger. All my whiz bang utilities couldn’t bring it back to life.
- The MacBook Pro is remarkably resilient to clumsy handling. Dented, dinged, it has withstood the punishment my wife gives it.
- A spare 750G 7200 RPM hard drive is in there, the laptop is up on 10.7, and is running well.
Fortunately, most of the important documents are on her iMac, and the laptop was really a roving computer.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t use migration tools as the disk was totally hosed. So it is a fresh start.
