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Ah, but what if you had no internet connection and no prior experience with recovery of OS-X?

The option of re-installing everything without loosing my stuff is great, but there is nothing to support a simple End User such as myself, for that you must pay. I bought a mac to get away from this kind of thing. I now have a bitter taste in my mouth, there isn't even a hardware fault, I have uninstalled nothing and the system now appears fine. so it must be something in the OS that cocked up. Right?


Chapter 4 of the small CD sized manual that came with your Mini. Includes the instructions above on how to eject a stuck disk, along with instructions on how to reload OS X. It then also includes phone numbers for the Apple support department, that at least here in the US is actually good. I had been struggling with some broken spotlight folders in Mail about 3 weeks back, and finally decided to call. Wish I had earlier, as the tech got it back to a working state in about 30 minutes. It did take some time as it wasn't an easy issue to solve, something deep down got corrupted, but because of his skills narrowing it down, it got fixed in one call.

True, the Apple phone support is limited beyond 90 days if you don't have an extended warranty, but that seems common across the industry.

I think in general people need to remember a Mac is not like a Windows running PC. If you threw a broken Windows PC in front of a person who knew Macs, they would be just as confused at first. While XP does do the safe mode automatically, I have never had it be useful. Even recently with spyware infested machines, safe mode has never worked to clean it up, a format and reload was mandatory. And of course my recent lockup issue with my own XP box gave no hints as to what was wrong or why it hung on the XP logo screen even entering safe mode. It was only by chance that I unplugged a USB drive and it started working again.