Pulling Data Off a Dead Computer

My wife's new MacBook Air will arrive tomorrow and so I started the process of pulling data, files, and pictures off her old one. So how do you do that when the computer won't even boot? Today I worked to figure that out and had great success with the help of my oldest son.

The key to the process is that my son has a MacBook Air that is the same era as my wife's old one. He doesn't use it any more and loaned it to us. Having recently replaced the battery in the laptop, I have all the tools necessary to unscrew the screws for the case and access the internals. So after skiing this morning, I put both laptops on the kitchen table and removed the bottom panel for each computer. Then I gently removed the solid-state drive from my wife's and swapped it with my sons. The hard drives on MacBook Air laptops look more like a couple of chips on a printed circuit board (PCB) and could easily be mistaken for memory chips, which is exactly what they are, just a different kind of memory.

I screwed the back onto my son's laptop, flipped it over, and pressed the power button. The computer booted right up and I logged in. I made sure I could access all her files and then closed the lid, putting the computer into sleep mode. Then I put my son's solid-state drive into my wife's old computer, screwed the back panel back on, and tried to turn it on. Nothing happened which is what I expected. I really did this just to make sure I didn't lose any screws or parts.

My hope is that the new computer will work similarly to when I replaced my iPhone. All I had to do was put my old phone next to my new one and the initialization process for the new one automatically copied over everything from the old one. If it doesn't work that smoothly then I have a USB drive I can copy all of the important files to and then copy them to the new computer.

Not everyone has easy access to a second laptop and you may wonder what I might have done without it. There are devices you can get that are meant to access solid-state drives and my son also has one of those. Then of course, there is the option of going to the local thrift store like my 8-year-old neighbor and finding a cheap laptop similar to my wife's. Fortunately my first solution worked.

The Problem with Starting a New Video Game

Several days ago I decided that I wanted to start a new video game on my PlayStation 4 console. I put the disc in the drive and waited for it to copy a few files to the hard drive. The process didn't take very long and I thought I was ready to start playing the game. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I now had to wait for an Internet update before the game actually became available. I could play part of the game but quickly got bored and wondered why so many people enjoyed it this particular title.

The download took about an hour or two and I never waited for it to finish before quitting the game. Today I thought I would try again and see what difference the update made. Let's just say it is significant. I now have a story and natural progression to follow. I played for an hour or so this afternoon as I had the day off and earned several awards and trophies. Those little gems keep you wanting to play and made for a much more enjoyable experience.

Most gamers spend a long time deciding which video game they want to play next. Once they decide, they are patient enough to wait for updates to load. If you leave your PlayStation in stand-by mode and have a digital copy of the game you want to play, you can even start the download from your computer and have it notify you when it is done. Unfortunately that is not the way I sometimes play video games.

As someone that works for PlayStation, I have access to a lot of different games. Sometimes I will invite a group of people over to play but don't have any idea which game or games they would like to sample. This means starting a download and doing something else while we wait for the game to download and install. If I know what games people want to play before they arrive I can have everything queued up and ready to go. Unfortunately most of the groups I have had don't know what they want to play until they see my extensive library. Even then, picking a title to play can take a long time.

I don't see the trend of taking a long time to download a video game getting any better. If anything games are getting more complex and larger. I know that one of the advantages of the PlayStation 5 is that the included solid-state drive (SSD) allows you to keep a single copy of a graphical asset such as a tree and then reuse it multiple times throughout the game. I hope this means game files will shrink significantly. In order for that to happen though, game developers need to take advantage of that capability. Only after the PS5 is released will we be able to see if that has happened. I sure hope so because I really hate waiting so long for games to be really playable.

Time for a New College Laptop Again

Back in February I wrote about how my youngest son will soon need a new laptop. I didn't see the urgency in making a decision at the time because heading to college seemed so far off. In two weeks he will be home after spending two years in Armenia and getting ready to attend college.

As I wrote before he will need to talk with his academic advisor to see the best recommendation for his engineering program in school. Some engineering software is only available for Windows and so a Mac might not be a good choice. Or the opposite could be true. I doubt it, but it could be.

A quick stop at Best Buy shows that there are even more choices than before. In addition to Windows or Mac, you can also choose a Chrome OS laptop. If you can get by with using online applications for everything you do, then it is a viable option. I don't think it is a good choice for an engineering student though and so I won't bother looking at one of those.

The next question boils down to budget: How much do I want to spend for my son's laptop. I always joke with my other children about how I like my youngest son the most. They all think that is true but reality is that whatever I do for one child, I have to make it fair for all of the rest. When my older son went to pick his laptop, I looked at the lowest price MacBook Pro and used that as the maximum budget. Why? That is what I got his two sisters. While time passes and laptop specifications change, Apple has done a pretty good job identifying realistic price points for student computers. Yes you can get a lower-priced computer but they don't last nearly as long as if you spend a bit more. Just look at my oldest daughter's experience as most of her college roommates needed new computers before the end of the first year.

I am often asked if brand makes a difference. The short answer is, "Yes." You want to be careful about what you purchase online. However if you are visiting a reputable store like Best Buy, they won't carry a junk brand and so your choice will boil down to features for a given price. I recommend more RAM over a faster processor. I also favor a solid-state drive over rotating disk even though you can get enormous disks for next to nothing. If you think your child will have a lot of large files, spend $60 and get an external USB drive and factor that into the cost of the computer.

Writing all of this down has helped me organize my thoughts as I get ready to help my son with his computer. Hopefully it helps you as well. Naturally I will be sure to let you know what I decide.

Are You Better Off Now

It is election season and I try to avoid politics in my blog, but this is a question I keep hearing, "Are you better off today than you were 4 years ago?" One thing about technology is that it continues to evolve and so we should all be better off as time passes. The President of the United States could be a monkey with a dart board and we should all be better off with regards to our computers. So let's look back over the past 4 years and see how computer technology has improved.

When I look at my desk in my home office, I am much better off than I was 4 years ago. The biggest change is the advance in video monitor technology. I used to have a single 17-inch LCD monitor capable of displaying 1280x1024 pixels. Now I have 2 HDTV monitors on my desk. Both are seamlessly connected to my desktop computer and are capable of displaying 1920x1080 for a total size of 3840x1080 pixels. I don't know how I survived before.

Video monitors for my desktop are just the start. I also have a tablet computer. I actually have 2 tablet computers, both of which were given to me. I only keep 1 on my desk as the other one is kept upstairs in the bedroom. Most of the time I just use the tablet to play Pandora, but it is nice to be able to keep tabs on things when I leave the office without having to grab my laptop. The tablet is much lighter.

Speaking of laptops, I used to have a MacBook and now I have a MacBook Pro. The biggest difference there is that I now run a solid-state drive. They make great sense for a laptop because they are much more shock resistant. They are also a lot faster. My laptop boots in about the same amount of time as it takes me to count to 3. I'm still not sure about reliability, but my current drive is almost a year old and seems to be working great.

One final improvement worth mentioning is that we are starting to see more cloud technology. Sure some of it is just marketing. However we will start to see more services come to the cloud and life should improve because of it. Imagine walking into your house and having your digital camera automatically sync with your home network and upload your most recent photos to a staging area where you can sort them and share your favorites. We are almost there.

Technologically, we are all better off now than we were 4 years ago. Just don't let the politicians think they are responsible.