d00dism

Apple bumped .Mac’s storage to 1 GB (1024 MB for those wondering if they’d correctly count). They also released Backup 3.

I’ve been keeping my email allotment steady at 100 MB, but that’s been feeling a bit constricting, especially when Gmail is now allowing more that 2.5 GB and my web host gives me 5 GB. However, I really like using Apple’s Mail.app (Gmail does have POP, but that’s not adequate because I can’t do server side email management that way) and my web host’s webmail package, SquirrelMail, isn’t all that bad, it’s just not all that good, or at least not as good as .Mac.

Now that I can allocate 400 MB for email, I feel confident that I can stay within my limit (at least until it gets bumped again). This upgrade might also explain why the email has been going down pretty regularly for me. Hopefully now that the upgrade is complete, the rock solid reliability will be back (yes, I said rock solid; I don’t share the experiences of a select vocal few).

Backup 3 looks like a worthy upgrade to an originally very mediocre piece of backup software. Of particular interest to me is the suggestion that backup can be used to synchronize documents between computers. I’ve been mostly storing things on my Powermac and using file sharing to access them on the Powerbook, but this might solve that problem.

As usual, you can order both the regular and family pack versions of .Mac off my Amazon shopping page. You can buy it through Amazon for both new and renewing accounts. As an added bonus, the single user version of .Mac is a mere $77.99 (more than $20 off Apple’s online price).

I’m both throroughly embarressed and relieved. The Mac Genius was able to fix my Powerbook.

The steps he took were:

1. Re-sat the Airport card. I didn’t know that could be a common cause.
2. Reset the power manager. I did that.
3. Reset the open firmware. At this point, the screen was working. When I did it, I had to use my external display.

All is well again and seeing as a little bit of my pride saved me several hundred dollars, I think I can suck it up. I’ll have to hold off a little on applying for a part-time Genius position though.