My Mac and me
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Anonymous
My Mac and me
After taking the Mac apart to try and find what the hell is causing it to shut down all the time (it's 3 years old) I am still none the wiser. All the hardware is working fine and I have done a reinstall but it stilll seems to just switch off without any notice. The trouble with this thing is that if it is the logic board I may as well go buy a new intel Mac for less than £700. Look at the prices of parts for this thing, after adding Vat that lot comes to over £2,000 and that doesn't include half of the bits to make one of these up. Food for thought before you put your hand in your pocket. I know many of you have had Macs running trouble free for yearsbut I think the price of spares for these things is ridiculous....let alone £75 an hour for an engineer to work on it. I think I will probabaly end up buying another machine and taking out an exteneded warranty, it really looks worth it considering that just having the power supply replaced a month ago cost £300. Ivor knows a very good Mac engineer and will speak to him on my behalf to see what the problem can be....so there may be hope for it yet. I can tell you that my first experience of Macs has not been a happy one
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
There is no part on a car that can fail and would cost 75% of the price of a new car to replace, is there??
I guess the warranty can be extended....I will have to check. Would expect it to be a bit more expensive after the three year cover expires.
I will probably sell this one off as spares (the bits that work OK) and get a new 24" Intel iMac and as much warranty as I can get, as these things are not cheap to repair. I won't be caught out again!
I guess the warranty can be extended....I will have to check. Would expect it to be a bit more expensive after the three year cover expires.
I will probably sell this one off as spares (the bits that work OK) and get a new 24" Intel iMac and as much warranty as I can get, as these things are not cheap to repair. I won't be caught out again!
do you use the MAC for everything?
would a couple of PCs running linux be a benefit if you do a lot of batch processing and print management
cheep as chips as you assign a PC and free operating system to each single task....stack em up leave em running.
leaving you a bit of leaway on the spec of the machine you do the artistic stuff on...i.e buy something tuned to the task "the task that makes you buy a MAC in the fist place"
and leave the number crunching to a couple of right old sheds
it also means tghe MAC is not used as much and consequently will last longer
i.e the second hand PCs with free operating system do all the drudge work and can be replaced easiliy as and when
leaving your expensive tool i.e the MAC for the jobs that warrant its use
For example
when i worked for sky we used the large 8 meg TIFFs generated by our proper photographers or purchased for a news agency on our digital text system
we didn't need that quaility so we had a PC in the cupboard running linux
it had a perl script polling a drop directory
anything that it found in that directory it renamed based on date and file name ran it through a free ware graphic file converter and spat them out as medium quality MPG stills suitable for use on our system and low quaility jpgs or Gifs for thumbnails for menus
i.e the weekends football photos would come in
we'd pile them high into this thing and a hour later we had a nice sorted pile of mpg stills named dated and ready for editorial to choose from popped out.
they could then crop the orginal if they wanted and put it back through or use tha output as it was
i can't write perl which is a shame but a similar process can be set up using a scheduler to action a run of the conversion programme evrey hour or so.
the system was horrible...no windows front end all command line stuff but once set up it never went wrong or got switched off in 3 years.
dave
would a couple of PCs running linux be a benefit if you do a lot of batch processing and print management
cheep as chips as you assign a PC and free operating system to each single task....stack em up leave em running.
leaving you a bit of leaway on the spec of the machine you do the artistic stuff on...i.e buy something tuned to the task "the task that makes you buy a MAC in the fist place"
and leave the number crunching to a couple of right old sheds
it also means tghe MAC is not used as much and consequently will last longer
i.e the second hand PCs with free operating system do all the drudge work and can be replaced easiliy as and when
leaving your expensive tool i.e the MAC for the jobs that warrant its use
For example
when i worked for sky we used the large 8 meg TIFFs generated by our proper photographers or purchased for a news agency on our digital text system
we didn't need that quaility so we had a PC in the cupboard running linux
it had a perl script polling a drop directory
anything that it found in that directory it renamed based on date and file name ran it through a free ware graphic file converter and spat them out as medium quality MPG stills suitable for use on our system and low quaility jpgs or Gifs for thumbnails for menus
i.e the weekends football photos would come in
we'd pile them high into this thing and a hour later we had a nice sorted pile of mpg stills named dated and ready for editorial to choose from popped out.
they could then crop the orginal if they wanted and put it back through or use tha output as it was
i can't write perl which is a shame but a similar process can be set up using a scheduler to action a run of the conversion programme evrey hour or so.
the system was horrible...no windows front end all command line stuff but once set up it never went wrong or got switched off in 3 years.
dave
The Greater Knapweed near the Mugwort by the Buckthorn tree is dying
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Anonymous
I pretty much use the mac for any image editing, retouching, artistic creations and printing Dave. I have a high spec PC here but all the print profiles are calibrated for the mac and the PC monitor is crap for critical image editing. The PC is used mainly for admin and printing documents, labels etc plus running some programmes that you can't get for mac. I will use it for various btach processing commands ie just to resize or convert file formats too while I work on something else on the mac.
I still don't really understand the reasoning for owning a Mac, I've tried using several and moved them all on (last one being a 2007 20" iMac at work); I mean, if you were doing movie editing you'd get a Spark or something, but there's nothing available for Macs that isn't available for PC too ... and of course you can get PC hardware thats as good quality.
*shrugs* Sorry, its just one of those things I don't think I'll ever get
*shrugs* Sorry, its just one of those things I don't think I'll ever get
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Anonymous
Well, the Mac has now gone off to Mac heaven with a faulty logic board (repair estimate £600+vat). Luckily my insurance covered it, but rather than repair it I took the cash to put towards a better machine that does not have a logic board that costs as much as the whole Mac put together.
I am now on the lookout for a new Mac, preferably an Intel 24" iMac, so if anyone knows anywhere that has a good deal on them, let me know
chars
I am now on the lookout for a new Mac, preferably an Intel 24" iMac, so if anyone knows anywhere that has a good deal on them, let me know
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