Mac & Me
Dost thou hear the tolling of the bells? It is the death knell. The harbinger of doom. The audible sound of hideous doom.
While this week was greeted with joy - the joy of completing my 18-month course at Animation Mentor - it was suddenly stricken with the grief of demise.
My Mac is Dead. That's right. After only 3 years, it's dead. Fried Logic Board (that's Apple's term for a Motherboard) and at least one blown processor. It is presently shipping to a Bay-area repair location for what I hope is an inexpensive fix. At least cheaper than what the Apple store wants ($1700.)
I guess that I just wore the thing out. 18 solid months of extremely resource-heavy 3D work. Thankfully the failure came 18-hours after I turned in my final assignment at AM, and about 12-hours after I backed up most of my short film files. Also thankfully, the hard drives were not affected by the issue. I bought an external firewire enclosure and popped both drives out of the Mac to transfer all of the vital files over to my still functioning, 9-year-old Dell.
So the good news is I haven't lost any of my AM work. The bad news is, without a machine fast enough to run Maya, I can't complete and render out full-res versions of my short film shots or work on my DVD demo reel until the machine is repaired or replaced. This, naturally, throws a huge wrench in the job-seeking process. Theoretically, if all goes well, I should have the machine back the week after Christmas, but if all doesn't go well, then the only answer is a new 'puter.
Then, of course, the question becomes - do I get another Mac, or move back to the PC? Honestly, the latter is what I'm considering. For the price of a lowest-end new Intel Mac, I could buy one helluva fast and awesome PC - something that, if the motherboard or processor failed - I could easily fix on my own for a few hundred dollars. That, and the fact that this same issue has been reported by scores of other G5 and iBook users (even my friend Fox's iBook died from this exact same problem a few months ago.) This leads me to believe that there is an issue in Mac hardware.Does this issue carry over into the new Intel's? I would hope not, but would I really want to stake $2500+ on a hunch that in 3 years my computer will still be working? In these troubled times, would you?
I'm not going to post my final assignment version until I've had time to address the last few notes from my mentor and also polish up the big money shots some more. Until then, I'll keep you posted on what's happening with Spalding (that's what I named the Mac - after the late storyteller and monologist Spalding Gray.)
While this week was greeted with joy - the joy of completing my 18-month course at Animation Mentor - it was suddenly stricken with the grief of demise.
My Mac is Dead. That's right. After only 3 years, it's dead. Fried Logic Board (that's Apple's term for a Motherboard) and at least one blown processor. It is presently shipping to a Bay-area repair location for what I hope is an inexpensive fix. At least cheaper than what the Apple store wants ($1700.)
I guess that I just wore the thing out. 18 solid months of extremely resource-heavy 3D work. Thankfully the failure came 18-hours after I turned in my final assignment at AM, and about 12-hours after I backed up most of my short film files. Also thankfully, the hard drives were not affected by the issue. I bought an external firewire enclosure and popped both drives out of the Mac to transfer all of the vital files over to my still functioning, 9-year-old Dell.
So the good news is I haven't lost any of my AM work. The bad news is, without a machine fast enough to run Maya, I can't complete and render out full-res versions of my short film shots or work on my DVD demo reel until the machine is repaired or replaced. This, naturally, throws a huge wrench in the job-seeking process. Theoretically, if all goes well, I should have the machine back the week after Christmas, but if all doesn't go well, then the only answer is a new 'puter.
Then, of course, the question becomes - do I get another Mac, or move back to the PC? Honestly, the latter is what I'm considering. For the price of a lowest-end new Intel Mac, I could buy one helluva fast and awesome PC - something that, if the motherboard or processor failed - I could easily fix on my own for a few hundred dollars. That, and the fact that this same issue has been reported by scores of other G5 and iBook users (even my friend Fox's iBook died from this exact same problem a few months ago.) This leads me to believe that there is an issue in Mac hardware.Does this issue carry over into the new Intel's? I would hope not, but would I really want to stake $2500+ on a hunch that in 3 years my computer will still be working? In these troubled times, would you?
I'm not going to post my final assignment version until I've had time to address the last few notes from my mentor and also polish up the big money shots some more. Until then, I'll keep you posted on what's happening with Spalding (that's what I named the Mac - after the late storyteller and monologist Spalding Gray.)
posted by Rich at
10:30 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Richard, sorry to hear about your ordeal. Are you mainly doing alot of playblasting and animating or almost equal time with final rendering?
I have a g5 power pc here that's running up to 3+ plus years, and running intel macbook pro recently, both are still running well fingers cross. :-) Machines these days are hard to tell when it comes to failure. I still have a g4 440ghz and a powerbook 1.5ghz running as well hahahaah.
In anycase I hope your rendering issues are resolved. I am back to am for my 2nd round of c6. All the best.
Robin Teo
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