Next Time Your Computer Crashes, Here’s Some Helpful Tips

On Monday, my iMac stopped working.

It wouldn’t boot. It wouldn’t safe boot. It wouldn’t boot after PRAM reset, etc.

The guy I talked to at Best Buy said he suspected a failed hard drive.

Rather than leave my iMac right then, I decided to weigh my options: Geek Squad at Best Buy or Apple Genius Bar?

Either way, it seemed like I was going to be out $250 to $300 — assuming I needed only a new hard drive.

My brother is in IT. He said I should open up my iMac, check the hard drive, and replace it if necessary. He said there were video tutorials on YouTube.

Since I figured I’d save a minimum of $200 by replacing the hard drive myself, I went to YouTube and watched three different videos.

Then I started reading the comments.

One of the comments mentioned that Apple had issued a recall on certain iMacs sold between 2009 and 2011. I bought mine September 2010 — less than three years ago.

So I did another search and found this page:

http://www.apple.com/support/imac-harddrive/

I punched in my serial number. My iMac is included in the recall.

So today I went to the Apple Store for an appointment with the Genius Bar. Jonathan verified that indeed my hard drive had failed, and that Apple will replace it free of charge (normally $265.14) — which was a relief to me since I don’t get excited about paying to fix things that shouldn’t have broken in the first place.

I hope to be back on my iMac (with software programs reinstalled) by Monday next week.

For now, I’m back on my 8-year-old Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows XP.

Although I will have to reinstall a few software programs, all my data is backed up on SugarSync and Dropbox.

If you don’t have some sort of data backup in place, I highly recommend you do.

I had almost no warning at all that my iMac was going to crash. It started running slow on Friday and continued running slow over the weekend. So Monday morning I bought MacKeeper and did a file cleanup.

Went to do a restart… and… that was the end of my hard drive.

At least when I had to reformat my Dell’s hard drive about four years ago I got warning signs. And even then, the hard drive didn’t fail. It was really a problem of running Windows, which becomes more unstable over time.

Whether you have a PC or a Mac, you just never know when your computer is going to fail.

Which is why you should always, always, always have your data backed up.

-Ryan M. Healy

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Ryan Healy

Ryan Healy is a freelance copywriter, list manager, and the author of Speed Writing for Nonfiction Writers. Since 2002, he has worked with scores of clients, including Agora Financial, Lombardi Publishing, and Contrarian Profits. He writes a popular blog about copywriting, advertising, and business growth, has been featured in publications like Feed Front magazine, and has been published on sites like WordStream.com, SmallBizClub.com, and MarketingForSuccess.com.

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