Something in the Air (10/06/2009)
A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for around eighty years.
- Lathe of Heaven
Sometime around a month ago, my MacBook Air (MBA) hard drive failed on me. I couldn't boot from it. It was sad. What made it sad was that it died back in January of 2009, and Apple replaced the hard drive. What made it especially sad was that I didn't buy the extended warranty and I am out of the one year warranty.
But Disk Utility said the HD was fine so I rebuilt with a Snow Leopard install and then restored all of my files. I am very good at backup. Very good. I still have all the papers I wrote for school nineteen years ago on my Apple IIe. Wow. That makes me feel old. I suppose, in computer years, I'm a dinosaur.
After rebuilding and reinstall everything, it felt good. Things mostly seemed to be running perfectly. Except that my MBA would start producing a "kernel_task" that took up 100%+ of my CPU. Lots of research showed me that this little task was a throttle technique. it happened when the computer was overheating. it was generally caused by Flash attempting to play internet video upscaling it to my friend's 1080p 50" plasma. Sure, I could get the video to play by blowing a vornado fan on it, but not reasonably.
This little incident went on for a few weeks until, eventually, my hard disk got corrupted after an overheating issue. So now, here I am, stuck. My computer is out of warranty and I have an overheating issue that can corrupt the hard drive. So how do I deal with it? I have no clue. It makes me sad.