Coming to Terms with a Crash-Proof Laptop

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Coming to Terms with a Crash-Proof Laptop

12/6/2007

By Terry Calhoun

I've got a problem. My new laptop doesn't crash or freeze up. I've been using it now for nearly three months, and it just doesn't crash.

"How," you might ask, "does this present a problem?"

Well, it's a seemingly small thing that has cascading ramifications on my behavior and expectations in ways you might not anticipate. I know that I didn't.

Here's one: I now rarely ever turn my computer off, and when I do, it is more often a "hard stop," caused by pushing the power button down and holding it there, than a normal stop using the machine's operating system. I know that you are not supposed to do that, but read this from a user's perspective, please, and you will see that one of the ramifications of a never-crashing computer is that it outmodes the current "normal" way of shutting down.

My new laptop is a MacBook. One of the reasons I agreed with my IT guys that I would change operating systems was so that I could experience switching from Microsoft to Apple and write about it. I would not say that I have gone over to the dark side yet. This laptop still causes me regular angst due to the unfamiliar placement of buttons and scroll bars, and to the strangeness of the keyboard. But computing is changing for me ... because it never crashes.

So I find myself never wanting to turn it off. (It kind of reminds me of the place I was in when I decided that it was no longer worth taking the time to trash old files. Storage space is cheap and my time is valuable.)

I keep a power cord at home, one in the office, and carry one in my bag. At first, it was delightful to finish up working at my office, close its lid and pack the laptop into its carrying bag, then at home unpack it and open the lid back up.

Sometimes I would do that with one of my previous Windows-based laptops. It might work for one round trip, or maybe one and a half, but there would inevitably come the time when I raised the lid and the machine refused to come back to life.

That hasn't happened yet with my MacBook. Not one single time. Wouldn't it be nice for you if none of your faculty, students, and staff had computer crashes over the forthcoming holidays?

Here's the problem, though: My days at work and my time spent working while at home or elsewhere are not the kind where I often settle down into a single task for, say, half a day or more. I move between tasks with the speed of an electron. Starting at 6 a.m. at home, then moving to my office, then home again, I may use a dozen or more applications and open several dozen windows. Just in my browser, alone, at the end of a typical day there might be four to five open windows, with a total of nearly 200 live tabs.

You try shutting that baby down using the operating system. It wants you to approve the closing of each and every window, all 200-plus of which took hours, maybe days, to be opened as I proceeded through my recently performed tasks.