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BOB PEASE | CONTRIBUTING EDITOR [email protected]
When I was "allowed" to "retire" from National Semiconductor on March 14, 2009, I promptly went down to the nearby Apple store to buy a MacBook. It had a new and improved operating system, OS-X (10.5.7), also known as Leopard. I was tired of fighting with Microsoft-based computers.*
I paid $1000 cash plus tax plus a couple hundred bucks for a service contract. I took it home and it began to just work. I was very favorably impressed. It just worked! I could send e-mails, and I could receive them. I had heard all the good stories about Apple computers, and I believed I was through with grief.
But after a while I started finding leetle problems. This Mac- Book needed to be rebooted every six or eight days because it simply stopped working, on the average-about as poor as my old Lenovo T-61. So much for Apple's vaunted reliability.
Then I typed up a nice two-page memo in Apple's Mail software. Just before my computer went sicky-poo (that is a technical term), I clicked on "Save As Draft." I shut the computer down and rebooted. I went to "Drafts," and my memo was not there. That annoyed me-a lot.
I reconstructed the memo from memory. I shoved it into "Save as Draft," and I also shoved a copy of the e-mail into the free Thunderbird e-mail application from Mozilla, which my son Ben had given me. After the next big crash, I restarted it all, and the copy in "Drafts" was gone! But the copy in Thunderbird was saved. I was very grateful.
The search begins
Somebody told me, "Well, if you do a save, it might try to 'Save to Server,' depending on your settings..." What the hell was that supposed to mean? No info. Never heard of that.
Apple has several kinds of search machines in Leopard including Finder and Help and Spotlight-and calling the factory guys. I searched everywhere and could not find any info on "Save to Server." Neither my wife nor son could guess where to look.
I had bought a couple hundred bucks of books that claimed to be able to teach me everything I needed to know about this Mac....