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buyer's remorse
I bought an iBook G4 about a year and a half ago, and I find that I still regret not buying a PC laptop, nearly every single day. I can't think of a single thing that this Mac does better than a PC: it's only given me a half-dozen inconveniences that I have to circumvent with clumsy workarounds. None of that is particularly rant-worthy in and of itself, but there are technical problems of a whole other order that I've been struggling with lately. (People who maybe didn't come here to hear me complain in detail about a fairly technical problem might want to tune out right about now.)
Shortly after I bought the G4, it began crashing, usually during booting or in the first few minutes of use. I tried various "fixes" including Disk Utility, Archive + Install, the hardware test, deleting preferences, uninstalling different drivers, etc., but nothing seemed to work. Eventually the problem somehow corrected itself and life went on as normal.
Recently, though, the problem has come back, worse than before-- sometimes it'll take me 10, 20 tries to get the computer to boot successfully. I brought it into the Apple Store, and they said "do Archive + Install." I did that before and it didn't solve the problem, and I told them as much, but they urged me to do it again. So I did, but the problem still remains.
To me, the "last resort" was to erase the hard drive and start over fresh. This will require some tedious backing-up and a lot of tracking down application installation discs and serial numbers, ultimately a small price to pay for a computer that doesn't cost me an hour of my life every time I want to turn it on. The last sticking point was the problem of how to back up the precious, precious metadata in the iTunes Music Library.
The good folks at the Apple Store told me that I could back up the whole iTunes Music Library on an external drive and that this data would be preserved (provided that I also preserve the .xml file, the file where the play-count and ratings data is actually stored). OK, no problem: but now that I've gone to the trouble to wipe the whole hard drive I can't figure out how to *restore* the library from that backup.
This page suggests that copying the entire directory and dropping it in my new Music directory should work, but no, iTunes just sits there blithely, insisting that the library is empty. What gives?
Any suggestions you might have, gentle reader, would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping to avoid having to resort to a third-party program like CopyPod, although I have to admit it's looking pretty tempting right about now. Labels: personal |
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
6:34 PM
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