My Thinkpad is scheduled to go back to the shop on Thursday. A 5-hour chkdsk session seems to have cleared up some of the disk issues. The remaining problems are:

1. USB ports don’t work. They don’t even work on boot up, so it is not a Windows driver issue.

2. The IBM rescue partition doesn’t load.

3. Performance is worse than sluggish because a process called System (not System Idle) takes up 99% of my CPU. (The System process apparently is a catchall for kernel threads.)

Sigh.

PS: Unless you will personally warrantee the Mac you want me to buy — including you paying roundtrip Fedex if it needs repairs — do not leave a comment that I should be an aforementioned Mac. Thank you. [Tags: thinkpad]

Scott Kirsner argues that Apple is favoring Goliath over David (to use his trope), in an op-ed in the SF Chronicle today.

A PowerBook (12″, 60mb, 528mb ram that I’ll up to a gig) is on its way, thanks to the Harvard discount. And my Thinkpad is on its way to being repaired; I’m not ready to give up on it yet. I’ll blog later about why, as someone who has used Macs on and off since the mid-80s, I am not the fan that the rest of you all seem to be. I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just saying I enter this new phase of my life with trepidation.

Categories: Uncategorized dw