Google's Chrome Operating System laptop saved my butt

My problems started five days ago. Earlier driving up to the North County area of San Diego for a Sony event, I did something rare: Turn off my computer to put it more exactly than put it to sleep. When I later hit the power button, I observed something not seen since the hard drive failed in a first generation MacBook Air -- June 2008: A grey screen with Apple logo and progress bar indicating a file system/disk check/repair. The Mac took about five minutes just in case up, because of the check, to put it more exactly than the more typical 13 seconds.

By comparison, the 11.6-inch MacBook Air is a brick. In spite of being convinced by all the marketing and other hype about flash memory never failing, I deferred to logic and experience. Everything about the crash felt like a drive failure. So I hauled the Air brick over to the local Apple Store for servicing. The Genius ran a check-disk utility that failed. He as well booted up from an external drive so that I could recover any data from the ailing Air; I brought a 16GB thumb drive. However the Air was slow, copying sluggish and copying of any folder failing about halfway through.

Something else: The recovery utility delivered a cryptic -- anyway to the Genius and his buddies -- error message: "AppleMCP89TMS:PowerGatingDown." He Googled the error, which brought back results for sites in Japanese and Norwegian. I later used Google Translate to wriggle English out of the Norwegian site. Apple replaced the motherboard on one computer giving this error. Another poster indicated drive problems. The Genius decided that the flash drive had actually failed. The store didn't have one in stock, so it must be ordered previously there can be in-warranty repair.

The MacBook Air for two major benefits

I chose the MacBook Air for two major benefits: portability and reliability -- particularly storage. With no moving parts, I expected the drive would last for years, worry-free. I however will likely sell my Air. The drive failed in my 1st gen Air afterwards two months use. Apple Store replaced the whole computer. The hard drive failed in that MBA in September 2010; I replaced the drive with a 64GB SSD. So here I am on my third MacBook Air drive failure, which is about two too many.

Meanwhile, I'll be using Google's Chrome OS laptop as my production machine. I happen to be between Windows laptops right but. My regular Windows 7 machine is out on loan. So it's the Cr-48 or swiping my wife's laptop. I best let hers be. :)

Hey Joe, good to see you back on those Cr-48 keysI carry around a Dell mouse with me in my little notebook bag. If I find myself doing much tooth-gnashing, I just plug it in and life seems good again.I'm on week 12 with the Cr-48, and I've grown my use of Google Docs exponentially. In any given week however I use it to collaborate with work colleagues on documentation, prepare lectures for a one-night-a-week class that I'm teaching, maintain student grades and most spreadsheets all on Google Docs. I've given several public presentations using the VGA output from the Cr-48, and it is all in the cloud.What's actually been a wake-up call for me is how effortlessly that choice lets me use the best machine to that end: if I need some fancy graphic from a massive Windows workstation app, I generate it there and add it to my document from that machine. If I'm out and about I use the Cr-48, and if I'm at home I'm starting to use it more too just because it's quieter than my overclocked Ubuntu box. I've nearly bricked the Cr-48 myself a few times with homebrew Chromium OS builds, and am nevertheless back on Chrome OS Dev channel. However my data is in the cloud, so my stresses are more about "will I get the Cr-48 reimaged earlier dinner" than about loss of any data. ;^)

I keep my data at home and back it up online. This way, I never need the internet to access my data, unless I have a major failure at home, in which case I would need the internet to restore. Even though I as well back up to an external USB drive. So the only thing that would require restoring online would be my house burning down.

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