AVetter

Today I had to make a new experience with my macBook. Up to now I was quite happy with it. However this morning I had to work under Windows XP and once again I got a blue screen. After that I tried to restart, however there was no reaction only a white screen and the cooler was loud. My last backup is from yesterday evening so the old data is still secure but I think I need a lot of time to repair it, because I have never done this before with an apple machine. Up to now I have only experiences repairing a linux machine.

First of all I had to take the next train home so that I can start repairing it. However the next problem came up, because the macBook just ignored the OSX cd and I was not able to eject the cd. I tried every single option to eject the cd (F12, Eject button, Apple+E) nothing, and then after some tries I was able to get this cd. At this moment I was a kind of scared because what can you do without booting from a cd? As the next step I tried the next cd (Linux live cd) (Boot from cd: C) to check the partitions and to make some diagnostics. And that’t the point where I am at the moment, I hope I can tell you some good news in the short future.

Update:
Good and bad news at the same time. First of all the good one. The time machine is great, because I could restore my old osx with the backup image from yesterday. But my windows is gone with all data, because I’ve never bakuped it. It looks like the windows crash was a little bit to hard for my partitions, because the whole partition table was damaged and I was not able to repair it. Anyway I’m really happy that the main os is back =), so that I only have to reinstall one system. At the moment I’m thinking about to install windows Vista to give it another try. Up to now I had installed it once but only for a week or so and in addition this installation was on a slower machine.

If you have any experiences with windows Vista on a macBook I would be thankful about a comment.

Update:
Two days later I had again the same problem. This time the OSX freezed totally and I had to turn off my macBook. After I started it again, nothing happend. The only thing I heard was the cooler and the harddisk was very noisy. In this moment I recognized that my fear was correct and I have to get a new hd as soon as possible. However the desing of the macBooks is perfect and it was easy to change the hd. The next step was again the same as above, restore my old osx with the time machine and install windows again (This time no problem).

In the hacker contest “PWN to OWN” the Windows Vista and the notebook with the Mac OSX have been hacked. However it was not possible for the participators to hack the notebook with linux (Ubuntu 7.10). This is again a very good result for ubuntu and it’s not only secure, it’s also usable for “human being”. The result is a kind of funny because Windows Vista ask the user for every single step he/she want to do “are you shure ….”. Once more you can see that windows is unsecure and you should change to another OS if you are working with XP or Vista up to now. (VISTA = Virus Inside Switch To Apple)

So if you didn’t tried it up to now and you have an old pc at home or a harddisk with too much space you should try ubuntu. It’s easy to install and to use so give it a try and you won’t be dissapointed. Ubuntu