I would be worried about the crime rate, how often do cruisers get attacked around Brazil?

Mike & Rebecca wrote about some incidents in the islands:
http://www.zerotocruising.com/even-eden-had-a-snake/

Just curious Taru, but what kind of laptop do you have and what was wrong with it. I do a lot of work with different laptops and might know of something to do with it that your vendor missed. I've gotten free repairs from the manufacturer for over two dozen machines for clients, friends and family in the last couple years alone. :-)

thanks for link Tytti.

Dan: Basically I had two problems, computer freezing every now and then, and airport utility switches off on a regular basis. Both needs me to restart the computer to continue working with it. We left it for repair and the guy in the computer shop said that a diagnostics should be made to determine if something and what was wrong with it and when they didn't find anything on that diagnostic, he recommended me to replace the hard drive to a new, larger one plus update all softwares. That has been done now at a cost of $692 (new screen included in that price) and the computer is in worse shape than ever before. It freezes every second minute which makes me unable to use it at all without getting a nervous breakdown. Trying to solve it with the shop so they can give me credit equivalent to the amount that is wasted so that I can get that new laptop. Annoying lost of time and money. If you know the reason for a macbook pro freezing all the time, I'd be happy to hear about it. Thanks.

Almost everyone I know, had some kind of issue with macs.
Use a oldfashion bullet proof IBM, and if you have problem with that, 90% of the repairs could be done with a philips screwdriver.
Cheers

Sounds like typical virus activity. There was a major outbreak last week for the Mac computer.

Install and then update the following free anti-virus for Mac, then run a full computer scan:

http://www.clamxav.com/

I spent last July windsurfing on the NE coast of Brasil. It was so much fun! The small fishing villages are (wonderfully) simple and basic and such beautiful friendly people. With a combination of improved economics, young demographics, and progressive government policy there seems to be a very vibrant attitude among the whole population.
It appeared that anchoring close to shore with your draft may be challenging due to tides and shallows (but its great for kites.) 
Tudo Bem!              

Hi Taru,

The recent mac virus reported in the media was really a bit of malware. You wouldn't want it on your machine, but it shouldn't cause the machine to crash. It sounds much more like a hardware fault if it persists after the OS and application software have been completely rebuilt. You might find the following helpful:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57352461-263/how-to-invoke-and-interpret-the-apple-hardware-tests/

If you've still got the restore disks and can get the hardware tests to run it may help identify if you have a hardware fault. As for the comment about almost everyone having issues with macs that's just trolling. From a hardware perspective there's not much difference between the components in a mac laptop and a high-end PC laptop. None of them are particularly easy to repair as people demand smaller/lighter machines. People who are PC fans will always say everyone has problems with macs, and vice versa...

Why did the guy spend time (and your money) updating all the software if the machine was crashing all the time?

Did they install a new drive and copy of the operating system, then you installed all your software programs? Or did they make a copy/image of your old hard drive and copy that to the new drive?

If they copied everything from the old drive, then whatever is causing it was copied as well. Does the Mac have a "restore point", points where you can go back to last know working copy? Like on Windows each time an update is downloaded and installed, it creates a restore point that if you have a problem after the update, you can uninstall everything to that point.

What about software you recently (or around the time this started) that you installed? Go to your installed programe and select by date and remove each one to a period you remember there not being a problem.

How old is this Mac? If since you left, 100% the salt air being on a boat is going to get inside it and start to eat away at the electronics. Did they at least look in side and clean it up?

Sounds like a software issue if you are being disconnected all the time on top of freezing, which one comes or happens first?

Can also be the battery even if you have it plugged into the electrical, it can shut down by itself like a ghost in the middle of something, but if freezing and disconnecting, start with a restore point, if it doesn't have it, uninstall last installed programs and updates and patches etc. If they installed a new drive and blank OS and nothing installed and you reinstalled every thing from a back up, delete it all again (you have the original backup), and run with the clean OS by itself only for a few days and see if it continues, then for sure it is hardware related since you have not installed anything else on the new drive other than the operating system.

Sorry never used a Mac before but specialize in Windows.

thanks for your help. The laptop is being sent back to the store in sint maarten and they're sending me a new one so I'll let them fix the 4 year old laptop as best as they can. First thing to do on the new one is to install that virus program, I didn't even know Macs could get a virus?

Any machine can get viruses Taru. But historically Unix-based operating systems, including OSX, tended to be less vulnerable than Windows based machines. Furthermore, in the days when Macs were only a very small part of the market then there was little incentive for virus/malware writers to target them when, for the same or less effort, they could target a much larger Windows audience. As Macs become more popular such people will naturally turn more of their attention to these machines unfortunately. Although at present the attacks are still relatively infrequent compared to Windows machines. But just like parasites, such things rarely kill their host; they want it to keep running so they can do whatever they want to do, and remain undetected. As the last poster said, if the shop just reloaded your old setup on the new machine then it's possibly some kind of software incompatibility between something you've recently installed and the rest of the system. But if you started with a fresh install of everything then it sounds much more like a hardware fault.

Four years is relatively old for a laptop used in a potentially hostile environment, so it's not entirely surprising if something starts to fail. Our company replaces our Windows laptops every three years, and by that time it's fairly common for things to have started failing. These are heavily used machines, presumably like yours. If you just use a machine infrequently, in a home environment, then you'd hope for a bit longer lifetime. But no manufacturer, either Apple, HP, Dell, ..., really wants their machines to run much longer than 3-4 years. After all, they want to sell you the next model... Of course looking on the positive side, it's a good job the machine failed when you had easy access to repair/replacement facilities. It would have been much worse if it failed in the middle of nowhere as without a computer your readers would then have missed out on their daily escapism reading your blog :-)

It's a good job boats last a lot longer :-) Although it seems like boat manufacturers are also increasingly engineering things down to a price, to keep their profit margins. So I wonder whether current boats will still be as desirable in 30 years time as many 30 year-old boats are now.

Make sure you change all your passwords and login details (banking blog email other),any other presonal informations, etc not sure your security setup, but just handing over a computer to complete strangers regardless who they claim to be, is always very very risky.

Just saying... Plz get VMWare (virtual machine) and run / install ubuntu as your o/s when you get the new MBP. Should fix all of your issues going forward.

I simply got a brand new Dell Mini Inspiron Mini Notebook for Christmas today, but I'm having trouble finding exactly where we click to open a new tab in the internet browser. (Definitely not just how to open a brand new window, how to open a brand new tab.). . Thank you. :]<3.
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