I am a special kind of idiot.

Perhaps the biggest idiots are those that know too much about a given subject.

I've been putting off my mac support call for over a month, because I wanted to clean out my HD before sending my precious laptop off to some untrustworthy den of hardware techs, where they might look at my pictures and laugh, or sic the RIAA on me, or something. Having finally cleaned this machine out, I made the initial support call to mac.

The nice mac technical support operative on the other end of the line didn't seem to think the issues I was having were hardware related. In fact, he felt that we should try some "basic operating system maintenance" things first, like emptying caches, resetting the bios, and fixing permissions on the disk.

This seems to have completely fixed my problems.

Yes, I used a linux machine, built on hardware from 10 years ago, for over a month, instead of my beautiful 2008 macbook, because I am a computer guy, and I know too much about computers to see the forest for the trees.

--Christopher