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An impending nightmare with my week-old Apple MacBook looms. The right side of my spacebar isn’t working. This is a bit frustrating since I’m right-handed. The thing is, I bought the laptop in an Apple Store in the US. Everyone from the head of Apple Ireland to sales reps in Irish Apple retailers to the sales clerk in the Chicago Apple Store said that there was a global warranty. I’ve just called Apple support here in Ireland: they said it’s not their problem. They told me to call the Apple Store in Chicago. As I write, that store is closed. I’ve a feeling when I call them that they’re going to tell me that it’s not their problem either, since I’m in a different country to the one I bought it in. Should be interesting to see how this pans out…
When I picked up my shiny new MacBook last week -- for €300 cheaper in the US than here (€950 there as opposed to €1,250 here) -- I eagerly set about exploring the new features of its new operating system, Leopard.
One of these features is Boot Camp, a program which lets you put Windows on the computer, should you want to run regular business software or games (for all its multimedia elegance, the Mac is still poor in these categories).
After about five hours of freezes, restarts and forced shut-downs, I'm beginning to wonder why I bothered. The version of Windows I put in is Windows XP Pro, previously unused. Installing it has been a real trial.
The first problem is that the MacBook's DVD drive is very, very sensitive. If I shift position with the computer on my lap, the drive starts to sputter and complain, pausing installation.
The next problem was that it started to freeze just as it was about to finish installation. No forced-shutdown command would work, so I had to revert to the old reliable method of physically taking out the battery and putting it back in just to shut the computer down. Hardly the stuff of 21st century computing.
This happened several times until I just let the battery run out by itself to see if that would work. Bizarrely, it did. When I turned the machine on again, it booted into Windows XP.
Hallelujah, I thought. I went through some of the functions to make sure it was working. I then shut the computer down and switched on to get back to Apple's OS X operating system.
But no -- the MacBook did not want to let me do that.
As I write, my MacBook now boots into Windows XP as a a default every time I turn it on, which isn't exactly thrilling as I could have just bought a €500 Dell had I wanted that. (The only way of getting to Apple's operating system appears to be holding the 'option' key down when you press the power button -- this gives you the choice of either operating system.)
There is a software program called Parallels which, apparently, lets you run both operating systems side by side. I may resort to shelling out €75 for that. But it's a shame -- I had thought Boot Camp was supposed to do the job.
