WARNING: This topic is filled with terms and information that is mostly meant for geeks to hear and understand, so the average joe might not be able to understand all this. However, most of the terminaology used isn't too essential to the story and can be easily looked up anyways.
I have no problems with the Mac's OS X, that is not my problem. By problem is the hardware. To try to explain why I hate it so much, I will take you through my networking class today.
So I enter the computer lab and work room (the work room is where we actually repair our computers) expecting there to be little for me to do. We have to watch these videos that tell us crap about PC's so we can get A+ certification. However, I already finished the stuff we were supposed to watch ahead of time, so I was about a week or two ahead of the class on that. So I thought I would just end up studying the IRQ's and COM port addresses for the up-comming test and then draw a little in Flash 8. (I do a lot of drawing, very little animating, so don't expect anything.) So anyways, I was just minding my own business when the teacher starts handing out jobs. I was one of the few lucky ones that didn't get handed one. However, I later found out that was a curse.
All of the remaining people went into the work room so as to stand-by and assist the networking bosses with their grunt work, such and installing the RJ-45 jacks onto broadband cables. However, before I could recieve the "luxury" of doing one of these tasks, the teacher has a computer problem presented to him. It was an eMac that was running fine until reciently. Now it goes for awhile, and then at a random given time will freeze. So we came up with a short list of things it would possibly be.
A) Not enough RAM (personally, I thought this was the least likely)
B) Overheating (possibly too dusty inside)
C) Something slightly damaged (such as a little too much static eletricity to a critical componet)
Unfortuneatly, this pretty much meant to investigate, we had to open the puppy up. This is where the hating started. Now a PC nowadays usually just requires you press to two buttons simontaniously and the case opens. eMac's are a whole different story. This is what you have to do just to open up the cases to get access to the whole thing.
1) Go find a table and towel and place the down down flat on the table and place the eMac on the table, monitor down, with the stand facing you.
2) There are three hex screws you gotta unscrew, but unfortuneatly, they are between to two plates of the stand, giving you almost no room to work.
3) Once the stand is off, now you need a phillips screwdriver to open the access panel. This will give you access to the RAM if you need it, but almost nothing else. So if you need the case off, you must continue.
4) Remove the 3 crosshead screws and 6 hex screws to loosen the case. You will notice though it doesn't want to come off all the way.
5) Unplug the internal power cord that is attached to the power button. This is what is preventing you from taking off the case, but it is white like the case, so might be tricky to see.
So now we finally get it open, but then we realized we had a bigger problem. With PC's, you usually only have to remove one or two things to access something, if you have to remove anything at all. This eMac was so dense, it was amazing, in a very bad way. Another networking guy told me on eMac's, the hard drive is located at the very center of the comp, making it a bitch to get to. So i just said "screw it" and after finally opening the case, stuffed it in the cloest and just said I'd do it next class.
God I hate Mac's....
