Sillyness, werd

Confused Comps and other Drek

Well I do apologize to the three people who visit this site for the lack of updates, but my computer was confused. It seems that telling a Powerbook G3 Wallsreet running MacOS X.1.5 to boot from am external firewire HD is a faux pas.

So from the 20th until yesterday I was unable to use my computer. You see, one of the thousand ways that Apple computers and software are far superior to wintel/x86 boxes is that all the settings specific to the functioning of the system are stored in PRAM, or paramter RAM. This special cache of RAM is located on the logic board, and is not accesable by the common man/woman. This is good, because anytime your comp crashes, your system wide settings that allow the box to function are safely stored away, impervious to corruption.

Unlike wintel boxes that keep this information resident in the system core, mainly the HD. How many Wintel/Microsoft users have seen the evil message ” Your system registry has been corrupted, please restart and use registry checker to repair it.” Gives me chills.

So we have established that pram is good, “but why are you upset with it Chris?” You might ask. Well in my case it was evil. The pram had saved the info that directed my system to look to the pcmcia firewire card for its boot system. That being the case nothing I could do would persuade it to look elsewhere. And without the assistance of a help menu, you know on account that my system was down, I was screwed.

Long story short, I finally was able to get to a freinds house and look up the lovely command, reset pram. Then all was well in the universe again. Finally.