For Better or For Worse…I’m a Mac

At this time yesterday (Wednesday) I had no intention of writing this article. In fact, today’s post was going to be “Meanwhile, Back In WoW.” Guess that’ll have to wait till tomorrow or next week.

For quite some time, I’ve been having “issues” with my PC. In World of Warcraft, for example, I’ve done two complete reinstalls since installing WotLK. Still, I regularly got kicked from the game due to an error reading a file. And of course, the way the WoW client is built, you can’t simply reinstall a single, relatively tiny map or texture file. A couple times a week, I was having to run the Blizzard repair utility, which often told me my installation was “severely corrupted and would have to be restored to an earlier state.” At that point, I could usually cancel the repair, and restart the game just fine…until the next time.

Also of late (since about mid-April, I think), the PC was not booting promptly in the mornings. I have it set, in the BIOS, to boot at 7:30 each morning. That way, by the time I’m up, dressed, and have my coffee, my daily virus scan and other tasks are complete.

What was happening, though, was the computer would POST,¹ flash the “Starting Windows” screen, then reboot. The only way to boot successfully was to allow it to sit for 30 minutes or so after the “Loading Windows files…” screen in the repair utility came up. Then, I could power off the machine, power it back on, and it would boot normally.

I suspected a motherboard problem, but yesterday morning, I decided to troubleshoot everything I could (since I’d crashed out of WoW during a raid the night before, and I was pretty sick and tired of WoW crashes). I removed power, opened the case, and checked everything.

I reseated all four RAM modules; I reseated the video card. I removed a Creative Sound Card I wasn’t using. I did find that the front panel fan wasn’t connected, so I hooked that up to power as well as the SYSFAN2 connector on the motherboard.

At that point, the computer wouldn’t power on at all! So I disconnected both the power and motherboard connectors for that fan and hit the power switch. Yay! We have power. “Okay, seems like that motherboard fan connector is fubared,” I said to myself. Whereupon I reconnected the fan power connector (the 4-pin thingy that connects to the power supply).

Before I go any further, you should know that I have been playing around with PCs since before there were PCs: My first computer was an Atari 800 with cassette drive. I have built my own PCs for at least the last 15 years; I know my way around a motherboard and case.

So I have no explanation or excuse for the completely stupid act of reconnecting a power connector while power was on! A word to the unwise: Don’t. There was a bright flash and a very loud *SNAP*. I didn’t even get the thing fully connected. After that, the computer would power on, but wouldn’t POST. It would spontaneously restart after a few seconds, over and over.

Congratulations: You have successfully fried, at a bare minimum, your motherboard. There is a high probability that your Duo-Core CPU as well as 6GB of pretty damn good RAM are also useless metal, plastic and silicon.

At that point, I confess the air got a tad blue, and not from the smoking remains of my very-high-end PC. I went and told my wife my sad tale of woe: She didn’t have a ton of sympathy, but did say, “Well, you keep talking about getting a Mac…”

The irony is, I had just come to the conclusion, in the past couple days, that while I dearly love my MacBook Pro, and while iMacs and Mac Pros are pretty to look at and all that, in the final analysis, there really wasn’t that much wrong with my PC: 99.9 percent of the time, it operated flawlessly, and with Windows 7, even more powerfully than ever.

How quickly things change. The mishap occurred around 11 AM; shortly after 1 PM I was enroute to our local authorized Apple reseller (since Best Buy had none in stock), picking up a 24-inch, 3.06GHz iMac with 4GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive and the upgraded Radeon graphics card (since they didn’t have one in stock with the nVidia card). I also picked up a Mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter, so I could hook up my Dell 24-inch monitor as a second monitor.

Setup was as easy as any Mac is: Plug it in and turn it on. However, I also connected my Microsoft Sidewinder X6 keyboard, my Logitech MX Revolution mouse, my external DVD writer, and my external 2.1 speakers.

First happy discovery: Upon booting up for the first time, the iMac asked if I had a backup from another computer I’d like to restore. As a matter of fact, I’ve been using an external 1TB drive with Time Machine to back up the MacBook Pro. So I said, sure, restore from there. And voilà! My iMac was configured exactly the same as my MBP! Of course, the very cool thing about that was, I didn’t have to reinstall, from scratch, World of Warcraft! /happydance

Before raid time, I was able to get into the game, see that my add-ons were in pretty good shape (a lot of updates to be done, but no show-stoppers), set up Ventrilo, and discover I could configure my mouse to act just as it had under Windows.

Once the raid started, I found the Skype and Ventrilo clients for the Mac are not the same as their Windows brethren: Skype would disconnect every 16-17 minutes for no apparent reason, and I couldn’t individually change volume settings for specific players (we have a couple who are very, very loud).

On a very positive note, I didn’t crash once. My latency was about one-third what it was on the PC (lousy network card on the PC?) and my framerates in Dalaran were two to three times what I’d been seeing on the PC. I don’t know if it’s due to the iMac’s glossy screen (the Dell monitor has a non-glare LCD screen), but everything seemed much brighter and easier to read on the Mac, as well. All in all, a significant improvement to the WoW play experience.

After the raid, I decided to install VM Fusion and a Windows 7 virtual machine, as I had recently done on the MBP, so I could use Skype and Vent under Windows. But wait! They were already installed, due to my restored backup from the MBP. How cool is that?? And that’s why I am able to write this article in Windows Live Writer, on the iMac, in a Windows 7 VM.

So while, physically, “I’m a Mac,” virtually, “I’m still a PC.” And a very happy camper, to boot.²

Tagged as: Mac