I Got Lucky
Earlier this evening, I decided to upgrade my work laptop to Safari 3.1. Shortly after restarting, I was greeted with the Gray Screen of Death. To fix, I rebooted. Same result. 3rd time is a charm, right? Nope.
/me this is really going to suck, I'm going to have to give up my laptop for several days to get it fixed. Furthermore, this is my only machine authorized to VPN into LinkedIn's network. Looks like I'm going on vacation for the rest of the week.
Rather than trying to rescue the OS or upgrade it to Leopard, I decided to watch TV for an hour instead. When I came back, I disconnected the machine from its monitor and tried rebooting on battery power. Voila - it worked!
Now I'm in the process of using my old friend SuperDuper!.
I got lucky... when was the last time you backed up?
Posted by Rasmus on March 19, 2008 at 08:18 AM MDT #
Posted by Lars Fischer on March 19, 2008 at 08:41 AM MDT #
I have been on the mac for about a year and recently converted back to the PC and Vista. There were a number of reasons which I plan on blogging on. Both platforms are excellent however I was often a victim of the blank screen of death on the mac. It usually happened when i was about to catch a flight. It seemed to be occur about once or twice a month and related to different causes. One of the causes identified by Apple was based on battery strength There was a level of charge that caused the problem and anything above or below that was fine. I had the battery replaced 4 times but still the problem.
Like you however if I waited an hour or so everything was fine and it booted up with no indication of a problem. This got to be an unsettling proposition so I switched. I know most people do not have issues like this but based on the number of postings on the internet of similar issues I knew i was not alone. I know I will have as many if not more issues on the pc but I don't seem to have the mysterious blank screens as often.
One thing about having the mac I became an expert in backup software. I love time machine, super duper and one of my favs is crash plan which allows you to use a friends computer to get an offsite backup so now I have backups in many areas so that if I have a catastrophe I can recover data from offsite. I am glad you got up and running and hope the issue does not come back.
Posted by Scott Ryan on March 19, 2008 at 02:26 PM MDT #
Posted by Tony on March 20, 2008 at 08:27 PM MDT #
Every day when I go to work I plug my MBP into my external HD and everything is backed up. Not only will it be a life saver if I ever have to reinstall or get a new computer but I use it as a tool to do incremental backups of websites I'm working on. I'll do any large changes to the site I want then backup. If it turns out they aren't working like I want I can go back and replace them or if I want to grab some code from earlier that's easy as well! Time Machine has turned into an unexpected tool for developing <3
Sorry about your experience Scott. it sounds like your machine had some hardware issues, they should have just replaced it.
Posted by Daniel Tucker on April 03, 2008 at 05:22 PM MDT #