Fixing Dad's PC

[tongodeon]

I'm back home, fixing Dad's PC. The good news is that I didn't take this trip to plug in a loose monitor cable: dad's computer was definitely beyond his ability to repair. A family of spiders took up residence inside his computer, cobwebs were sucked into graphics card's GPU fan, siezing it, and the GPU cooked itself. Dad's beeps and "power

Comments

[creepyanonymous]

You're telling me there's no OSX equivalent of Safe Mode? Oy.

[creepyanonymous]

Okay, so there *is* a Safe Mode, which you can access by holding down the shift key when the machine boots, after you hear the startup chime.

Did Apple Support not tell you this right off the bat? If so, double oy.

[tongodeon]

They told me nothing of the kind. I officially pronounce them finks.

[tongodeon]

Then again there's no Windows equivalent of booting in single-user console mode. ;)

[mmcirvin]

HAR HAR GET A REAL MANS PC MAC LUSER

but seriously, folks...

[mmcirvin]

The monitor syncing is interesting: in my experience, Mac OS X tries to recover from this sort of thing by switching back to the original resolution, but when the monitor just switched itself off the computer might not have gotten the clue that anything was wrong.

Current Macs actually have more funky secret booting features than most PCs because of Open Firmware (this is eventually going away when the Intel machines come out, to be replaced by what, nobody knows-- the dev boxes just have an ordinary Phoenix PC BIOS, but that might not be indicative). For instance, you can boot from an OS CD by holding down the C key during boot; that's useful for lots of recovery-type tasks. If the support people didn't tell you that, they are truly useless.

Re: but seriously, folks...

[mmcirvin]

...also, if I recall correctly, booting with Command-S held down puts you in single-user mode, where you've basically got a root user running with a text-only shell. I did that a lot back in the early days of OS X when it kernel-panicked way too much, and it was the easiest way to run fsck on the boot volume. You could then go into a user's Library/Preferences directory and mess with the .plist files to ream out bad preferences by hand. But that is probably too wizardy for support people to tell you to do it.

[tongodeon]

This was a problem that would have been common to any Mac with an external monitor. It's an OS problem, not a hardware problem.

I would like you to mention that the mac mini's power coord yanks out way too easily. I was fiddling with the network cable and accidentally unplugged the mini.

[creech]

Computers suck.

[gaping_asshole]

Amen.