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.

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. 🙁