Category: Geek

Recently while my iMac was down due to hard disk failure, I had to take out my old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop to use.

I was quite surprised this 8 year old computer was still working well.

Before I put the laptop into storage I had cleaned it up, removing unnecessary programs and documents.

So when I booted it again I just had to update the antivirus and browsers and I was good to go.

The only problem was the screen.

If you notice the photos above, you’ll see the LCD screen seems to be wrinkled like paper. I think the plastic has dried and shriveled up.

This is the Dell laptop beside the downed iMac, displaying a photo of themselves from 3 years ago.

The Dell Inspiron 5100 is so old, I have even forgotten the specs.

But turning on the computer again reminds me of the times before I got married.

Some of the memories that came back are:

1. Playing DotA and Star Wars Jedi Academy on this laptop.
2. Doing my assignments and writing my dissertation.
3. Getting this laptop. It was the first computer I bought with my own money.

Last week the hard disk in my iMac died.

I had to take out my 8 year old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. Surprisingly it still worked.

This is an old photo of the Dell laptop that was about to be placed in storage.

At first the iMac would not boot. It was stuck at the grey screen with Apple logo and did not proceed from there.

I rebooted in safe mode (Shift-S) and saw a lot of disk i/o error messages. Oh oh.

I tried running fsck and Disk Utility, and both told me that they repaired the disk successfully. But after that I still could not boot.

It finally ended up booting and stuck and the white screen of death. No response, no disk activity, nothing.

I suspected that the hard disk had finally died.

So I contacted the different Mac stores to ask for hard disk replacement quotations.

Would you believe it, only one store bothered to reply? It was MacCity (where I bought the Mac). I also requested a quotation from MacCores, a non-official service agent.

Both MacCity and MacCores quoted RM250 for hard disk and RM150 for labour. The difference was:

1. MacCity was replacing with 500GB hard disk but MacCores was replacing with 1TB.
2. MacCores response time was amazing. Replied to my email within hours.
3. MacCores can replace my hard disk on-site. For MacCity I will have to bring the iMac back to 1 Utama and they will send it back to service centre.

I finally decided on MacCores.

In fact, they will be coming today to replace the hard disk at my condo. No need to send in to service centre, and no need to wait.

Update: Disk replacement was completed in less than 1 hour. Now that’s what I call great service!