Apple Itunes killed my Laptop!
Well, here's another story to add to the growing list of people who had problems with Apple's 7.0 release of Itunes.
I recently was uploading some music to my ipod when itunes informed me that some of the files could not be uploaded due to the fact that the Itunes version I was using was too old. Odd comment considering I was using the latest version pre-7.0. Being someone who likes to be up-to-date software wise and having been pleasantly bemused with the previous upgrades to Itunes, I proceeded to download 7.0 straight from Apple's servers.
At first things appeared to be going fine, my 8mb ADSL whipped the set-up file down the telephone line and I was then prompted to run the set-up file. I proceeded to do this, which recall clearly as it was telling me about this great new Artwork download service.
Let me break here to briefly ponder about this Artwork download service. Firstly, Apple tells me that they take information about my entire music library, match it to the appropriate artwork and make a note of the songs that didn't have artwork. As I never got to run Itunes 7.0 (rest of my story to follow shortly), I don't know if this is something that you can turn on and off. Why would I want to do that, well, in case you hadn't noticed this very subtle invasion of your privacy that could lead to your listening habits being used for targeted marketing or that you may be accused of piracy by not having bothered to download the artwork when you ripped your personal collection. Now that I have ranted about Apple's privacy invasion tactics (please correct me if I have misinterpretted Apple's intentions here), let me continue my story...
Well, once Itunes had installed the 7.0 version, it proceeded to analyse my entire library. Now I run my music library off a network hard drive to save space on my puny laptop hard drive, which can lead to some network lag or delays, but even after going out and coming back 3 hours later, Itunes still wasn't finished analysing my library.
Being slightly fed up, I decided to abort the process and let it run over night. However, when I tried to do this my system was suddenly unresponsive. No amount of clicking, crtl + alt + del' ing made any difference. Finally, I decided to do a hard reboot and start my system over.
To my horror, clicking noises started eminating from my laptop and Windows wouldn't boot up. The computer kept saying that it couldn't find the operating system. I, of course, knew that the operating system was on the hard drive, but something had gone horribly wrong and the hard drive was shot.
Now a quick complement to the folks at Toshiba... As my laptop was still under warranty, Toshiba were quick to pick it up and are in the process replacing the hard drive. I was half expecting them to refute my warranty claim, but the were quite happy to give some good customer service.
Finally, a word of warning.... make sure that you always make backups of important data and verify them. I assumed that this wizzy programme Memeo that I was using was doing this for me, but of course it didn't. I am hoping a good friend can help me recover some of the data from the defunct hard drive (which Toshiba is kindly loaning back to me for a deposit of £230). But next time, I am going to make at least 2 backups, one on my network hard drive and the other on a DVD.