Bonus!

It was with great relief that I unpacked my repaired laptop yesterday afternoon. Two weeks without its high power computational abilities was about a week and a half too long. But it was back, I was happy and I was also going to get OS 10.5 loaded on it as well (since the hard drive problem before prevented me from upgrading).

Imagine my delight when I got it fired up and noticed that my previously 100 gig hard drive had magically been upgraded to a much more spacious 185 gig post format drive.

The nicest thing about this unexpected upgrade is that I am finally going to be able to wrangle my ridiculous and sprawling music collection. There's been no easy way to roll through my multiple mp3 libraries and get rid of the duplicates, of which there are many.

So I'm importing all of the songs into iTunes, allow the application to copy the files to the iTunes folder. Once all of the disparate and overlapping folders have been consolidated into one mega folder, I'll use the Show Duplicates function and cull the extras from the list. I expect that'll take a little work as I haven't figured out an automated way to do it yet (got a solution? share it!).

But it will result in a final consolidation of four or five distinct but well overlapped libraries funneling down into one and I expect a space savings near a hundred gigs. Which means I'll be able to start on my next consolidation project of pulling all my photos into one mega-library. That'll be lots of fun, I'm sure.

I wish the repair hadn't taken so long but Apple more than made up for it with the hard drive upgrade. And boy does this MacBook Pro scream (in a good way now!).

Faster Than Faster and Quicker Than Quick

That's how I am going to describe the service on my laptop. I dropped it off on Monday afternoon around 2 to have the motherboard replaced, which meant that it had to get sent to an Apple repair house.

They called me today to come and pick it up.

That's under three days for a shipped out repair. No, it wasn't cheap but it was worth it to have my speedy little baby back.

Now I can start to really get some steam behind my photography site.

We also had a nice trip to one of the parks in Santa Cruz, this one overlooks the Boardwalk and has some interesting equipment to play on but also has a bunch of slides.

There was also a trip to CostCo in there as well but it was a trip for necessities, nothing too fun this time around.

I'm just thrilled to have my machine back and with a screen I can actually see, that makes all the difference. And Apple didn't even wipe my hard drive in the repair process. They did, however, declare my third party RAM was a problem and took it out to send it back, the repair shop put it back in for me.

Overall, I'm very, very happy tonight!