Well, the "buggy crashy" thing that was vexing me and my Mac has finally resolved into the Big Death. I am so hating Apple right now....

[swearing time-out]

Okay, I'm back. The saga has been a long and painful one. I think I've already listed the many ailments this 30-month-old computer has had, so I'll just summarize:

• CD-R: failed, replaced
• Hard drive: failed, replaced
• Keyboard: failed, replaced
• Firewire Port: failed, Apple refuses to replace
• Logic board: failed, Apple refuses to replace
• Replacement hard drive: failed last night

I am typing this post on a Dell that is more than twice as old. Of the three Windows machines in the house, it is the youngest. Apparently Apple is not up to snuff when it comes to QC. Cutting corners by using crappy components? That's what I suspect.

I love OSX, don't get me wrong. And I came to like the interface. And it's always a pleasure to get away from tools built by the Evil Empire. (Did you hear the one about Bill's middle name? Ninth.)

But it seems that the OS itself, too, has a flaw to which Apple does not want to own up. It is the dreaded....

overlapped extent allocation error

Now, if you Google this, you won't be hitting the Apple site. That is because there is scarcely a mention in their knowledgebase. No, this is a problem in OSX that Apple refuses to acknowledge. Yet it is something that can crop up with the user's never realizing it. And the worst part about it? The disk utilities cannot fix it! Why, I don't know. Even Microsoft has been able to fix bad sectors for years, and Norton has been doing it for decades. In fact, that was the flagship program.

Apple's website offers no solution -- except the unhelpful "reformat and reinstall" suggestion, which, as it turns out, may not even then fix this problem. (These are really bad sectors.) You cannot even pick up the phone and call. If your warrantly has expired, they do not want to hear from you at all. No $25 tech call. No, not at any price (except buying a new computer).

Thank goodness for the other resources out there. Most helpful to me was The Mac Help Desk, where I got much help. It filled in what I wasn't quite getting from the various mac geek forums, where everyone seems to be a *nix wiz. Also helpful was Westwind's OSX command line glossary.

I don't know if I'll buy another Mac ever again. Having a great operating system doesn't count for much when it's loaded onto a bunch of second rate crap hardware. And trying to get by without real customer service and support just strikes me as a bit stupid. I can say this: my next computer will be winderz or linux. And when I can find some cold cash that's about to be used for kindling, I'll consider buying hard drive #3 for the Mac. I sure don't relish the possibility of throwing good money after bad. But there's all that darned graphics and media software to consider.

Maybe I should just take up gardening.

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media girl also blogs at other places.