Mac Mini: The Ultimate Windows Recovery Tool
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under Rants and Not-So-Rants
I’ve always been a Windows guy. I don’t have anything against Macs (they sure are pretty), and I can see why people who like them really like them, but my one (and only) attempt at making the switch to being a Mac hipster turned out to be an exercise in lost time. So for now, I’m still Bill’s bi-otch. I’m the first to agree that Windows sucks, but I’m familiar with how it sucks, so at least I can usually anticipate when it’s going to suck really badly.
Not long after that one time Mac-tryin’ session, one of my Windows machines went nuts. Now, I’m used to this sort of thing (like I said, I know Windows sucks), but this time around was a little different than I was used to.
Rather than loading windows, the machine was just giving me a great, big cursor. It was funny at first, as the cursor filled almost all of the screen. But, once I realized this was going to happen forever, the humor was lost pretty fast.
Since I’m used to Windows going south every now and then, I usually have a backup machine ready to go. Unforutnately, that wasn’ t the case this time around, as this machine was just a couple months old (serves me right for buying anything in a box that looks like a cow), and I was still in the process of moving files around, so there were files on the dead machine that I needed to get to.
After pulling the drive out of the dead machine and dropping it into a USB enclosure, I expected my other Windows machine to read the disk and let me copy my files. No such luck. To my dismay, none of my Windows machines could read it. Life was bad.
As I calmed myself enough to start calculating how long it would take to reconstuct all of those lost files, my Mac Mini, still sitting on the corner of my desk from that adventure into OSX-land, caught my eye. Could it really be that simple? Was Apple about to earn every penny of that $600 ? Turns out that it could… and the Mac read the drive and let me recover everything. Life was good again.
The moral of the story… get a Mac, if for no other reason than to make your bad day good again when Windows goes stupid on you (and you know it will).
November 21st, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Ever thought of running linux? PClinuxOS is good for first time switchers, being one myself.
June 11th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
[...] I’m [for the most part] a die hard Mac hater, I keep a couple of Macs in the office for testing applications (or perhaps [...]