Once over again, the restore or replace predicament has reared its ugly head to problem the peace of our ecofrugal lifestyles. And once more, it's my computer it's far responsible.
Over the past few weeks, my little 6-one year-antique Mac Mini (properly, in truth, 7 years antique, since it became a refurbished 2010 version while we offered it in 2011) has developed a very frustrating dependancy. In the middle of some reputedly innocent hobby - pasting a bit of text, clicking on a link, or even simply scrolling via a file - it will unexpectedly freeze up and refuse to reply to any commands in any respect. You can despite the fact that move the mouse, however it does no unique, due to the fact some other application you click on on on will simply freeze up as nicely. Generally, it involves once more after a few minutes, however once in a while it appears to go back to, excellent to move at once again into its seizure the minute you attempt to do anything. The simplest element it's assured to fix the problem is a tough reboot (which occasionally includes shutting the electricity off on the deliver, due to the fact the laptop won't thaw out lengthy sufficient to let me near it down properly).
Now, there are all varieties of troubles which could motive a Mac to occur the spinning seaside ball of loss of life, consisting of processor overload, memory overload, insufficient tough force area, and overheating. All of these are pretty clean to fix. But Brian cited that whenever my laptop did this, the spinning ball become often determined by way of way of a high-pitched whining sound, almost too high to pay attention, emanating from the gadget. That became an ominous caution signal that it can be the tough strain at fault - and that is truely no longer a brief repair.
According to this IFixIt guide, changing the tough stress is only a
We also looked into what it would cost to replace the machine entirely. I had already decided that this machine was going to be my last Mac, even though I've been a loyal Apple user for over 30 years (ever since I got my first Apple IIc as a bat mitzvah gift from my grandfather), precisely because this "horrifying" upgrade process is all too typical of the way Apple does business these days. They seem to go out of their way to make it as hard as possible to upgrade an old machine, because they don't want people to upgrade; they want them to throw it out and buy the latest model instead. This business model is exactly the opposite of ecofrugality, and I'd made up my mind I wasn't going to support it any longer. So I checked the ConsumerSearch report on desktop computers and found that the "best cheap computer" was the Intel NUC, an ultra-compact machine that can be customized to fit your particular specs. Brian found that a kit that would meet my needs would probably cost between $500 and $600 (including an add-on CD-ROM drive, which I use for ripping music CDs).
But we decided perhaps it was best not to get ahead of ourselves. We didn't know for sure that the problem was the hard drive, and we didn't have the necessary tools to figure it out at home. So we took it to one of our local computer repair places, Linx 8, which specializes in Apple repairs. We'd already checked with them and found that if we left it with them, they could run a set of diagnostics on it to pinpoint the problem, and they wouldn't even charge us for it. So we figured we had nothing to lose by trying it. The only question was, if they found it was the hard drive that needed replacing, how much should we be willing to pay to replace it? We already knew that we could, in theory, do it ourselves for around $80, but only at the cost of many hours of hard work and aggravation and a nontrivial risk of screwing the process up. So how much was it worth to us to avoid that?
Brian and I came up with different answers to this question. Brian's thought was that it was definitely worth $150 - twice the cost of doing the repair ourselves - but $200 would be pushing it. I, by contrast, thought that, according to Jeff Yeager's 50 percent rule, we should be willing to pay up to $275 to fix the machine - half the cost of replacing it. But since he was the one who would probably end up doing most of the work if we did it ourselves, I figured it was his decision to make.
So, when he shop called this afternoon to tell us that my Mac did indeed need a new hard drive, and their fee to replace it - including reinstalling the OS, but not any paid software applications - would be $270, I turned to Brian before giving them an answer. And his response came in two parts: a somewhat disgruntled sigh, followed by consent. It was more than he really wanted to pay, but if it came to a choice between paying the fee or spending the whole of next weekend working on my computer, it was preferable to pay up. (He said no, however, to the additional $75 charge for migrating over all my data, including the large music library. We'll have the original hard drive back from them, as well as the backups, so he thinks we should be able to manage that part ourselves.)
So they're working on that as I type (on Brian's work laptop, borrowed for the weekend), and we should be able to pick up my computer tomorrow or Monday. And I, for one, think we made the right choice. It wasn't the cheapest in dollar terms, but I think it strikes the best balance between saving money, avoiding waste, and minimizing stress. If paying an extra $190 can save us an entire weekend spent fussing over my computer - and keep the old one out of the landfill a little longer - I think it's money well spent.
