Do you see my happy dance? I fixed my computer! Just did an Archive & Reinstall of the OS and everything came good. I then re-downloaded all the updates and patches and applied them all. (I used the combined update to take my system from 10.3.5 to 10.3.7.) Everything works great. The video problems are fixed as well as my Firewire issues with the iPod. I guess my original 10.3.7 was just a bad update!
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Hmmm, doesn’t sound that different from a typical Windows OS experience. Apple loves to proclaim ‘ease of use’ but the average user’s head swims when they hear the ‘archive/reinstall’ and point-release lingo. I certainly like OS X better than Win XP, but it’s not the night-and-day difference that Apple-only snobs love to brag about.
Sorry, that sounded a bit snarkier than intended, and I wasn’t trying to imply you’re an Apple snob. I’m an Apple fan, but I don’t think that every single thing they do is uber-cool. (gasp…trying to suppress memories of the Newton…)
I’ll wear the snob mantle! 🙂 I do still think it’s pretty night-and-day. I had Windows crash on me three times at work today. And the terminal in the knitting department suddenly decided it didn’t want to make the point-of-sale system full screen, so I had to peer at a tiny window all day. At least when my Mac goes down, it goes down hard with a fixable hardware failure. (And it has gone down. OS reinstall was a phantom cure; display issues are still happening. So I’m calling it in tomorrow.)
And I can see your point about the lingo, but really my jargon wasn’t as nerdilicious as it sounded. “Archive and Reinstall” is literally the option that pops up in big bold text when you put your disks back in. I just clicked it; I didn’t type some arcane unix command. I just wanted to be specific in case somebody with the same problem came googling through… (Not that it’ll help. Because again, my computer: DEAD.)
Actually the average user probably wouldn’t be in the same situation – I’m an early adopter of a brand new model, and I have a tendency to patch as soon as OS updates come out. I hope this is just an isolated case of hardware failure… And, as Snookums pointed out tonight, it could just as easily be a flaw in the third-party RAM we installed. 🙁