System Restore

By caffeine.bloodstream

3.29.2007

Disclaimer: The only Mac I own is the one on my desk. Also, this is going to make very little sense if you haven't seen the commercials. Apple dot com slash getamac slash ads.

3

The ad in the phone book had promised "24 hour service", but he'd still been a little impressed (and more than a little relieved) when one of the 'geeks' actually made a house call at close to two in the morning. Then again, maybe it made sense that PC's guys were ready to jump in and save the day. Judging by the overall demeanor of the guy who showed up, this wasn't the first time someone had called them in the middle of the night, freaking out about a PC doing things it shouldn't.

When he arrived, PC was still in his eerie comatose state, not peaceful enough to be asleep but not conscious enough to be running. Mac wasn't sure whether the lack of change was a good sign or a bad one, but either way he was going to wear out the floor if he kept pacing the way he had been. It was more than a little jarring when, after a few unoptimistic keystrokes, the technician had sighed deeply, reached back, and simply pulled out PC's power cord. Way more than a little jarring, when PC in turn sighed and went deathly silent, features going blank. It was one of their most fundamental differences – PC was a desktop, Mac a laptop. Which meant the closest he'd ever come to what he'd just witnessed really wasn't close at all. He'd never been "hard rebooted", as the glasses-sporting Geek (he actually looked like what PC might have conceivably looked like with maybe twenty less years under his belt, Mac had noted absently) phrased it. Once or twice he'd been left unplugged, but that just meant drifting slowly off to sleep to wake at some uncertain later point, exhausted and without any memory of the time that elapsed. He'd never just…just gone off like that, in the frightening absolute way PC just had.

"What's going on?" he asked, raking a hand through his hair, trying to get a grip. Laid-back was usually his thing, but he just wasn't going to manage it tonight, and the thoughtful frown on the Geek's face did little to comfort him.

"Virus, if I had to guess. Something messing with his boot menu. Have you downloaded anything suspicious lately?"

"I really doubt it," Mac answered, after a moment's thought. His own hard drive would probably get him on the bad side of quite a few copyright owners, and possibly the RIAA (but who wasn't on their bad side, honestly?) but PC tended to avoid legal gray areas. Hell, he read the end-user license agreements. Nobody did that. If he'd gotten something, it'd probably just snuck in and taken advantage of him, as some unsavory popup or innocent-looking toolbar. Mac made a mental note to ask him about that later, and to remind him for the nth time that mucking up his browser could only end in pain. But that was for later. Now was no time to be planning out his security lectures.

"So, um…" he started, and the Geek – Brian, according to his nametag – looked up. "What now? I mean---how do you fix this? Do you have to install something?" From what he'd seen, that was the usual treatment for these. Someone (Mac himself, in a few recent cases) would provide a disc with the necessary patch or antidote, then go through any of a number of bizarre processes to make it take effect, and that'd be it. But even the worst of those cases hadn't been as severe as this was starting to seem. To him, the idea of an aftermarket hardware upgrade or reinstallation was more than a little foreign. For PC, he learned, they were almost a fact of life.

"Welllll," sighed Brian, eyeing PC thoughtfully, even giving him a spontaneous little nudge as if he thought that might wake him up. It didn't. "Probably easier to deal with in-house. We'll take a look there, see what's causing the trouble…" In-house, Mac deduced, meant PC'd be staying over for the repairs; at that point, the surrender to well-trained people was less intimidating and getting closer to a comfort. That comfort wasn't to last, though; Brian chewed his lip briefly, then glanced up to Mac.

"Thing is, if we can't even get a boot screen, it's not gonna matter –what- kind of virus it was. I mean, it'll sort of matter, if it was one that damaged anything internally, but…I don't see any signs of that. You haven't noticed any smoke or anything coming out of the vents, right?"

"No," he answered quickly. Smoke? He'd been on the verge of panic when PC shut down without warning. If he'd started smoking, Mac probably would have blown a circuit.

"Okay. Then…for a big virus like this, the usual thing to do would be a system restore."

Mac had only a vague idea of what that entailed. As a general rule, vaguery scared him more than exact details. It was one of the few things he and PC had in common – they both wanted to know specifically what was going on, whenever something notable was.

"System restore?" he echoed, wondering if all who called the Geeks looked as clueless as he probably did right then.

"Yeah. What OS are you running?"

"Ten," he answered. The technician stared at him flatly for a moment before he realized what the question actually was. "Oh---him. Uh…Vista. Just installed. Business edition, I think. Is there a Business edition?" If there was one, he thought, it'd be the one PC had.

"Yeah. Okay, well…for a system restore, we'll basically wipe all the memory and reinstall from that OS. It's a total clean slate. There's an extra charge to back up your files, although…this far gone, it's hard to say if we'll be able to get much off the drive." Mac was starting to think that maybe vague actually had been better. He didn't like the sound of this at all. "If you want, we'll recover as much as we can, but there's definitely gonna be some data loss. On the upside…you'll probably get better performance without whatever extra junk might have piled up in the background."

(Briefly, Mac was tempted to defend PC's "extra junk". It gave him…character. He resisted.)

"So…If we end up doing a system restore, do you want the data backup, assuming we can get any?"

Every single part of that sentence was frightening. PC was sicker than Mac could fix. They were painfully close to something even Mac knew was an absolute last resort, one that might leave PC with nothing – no memories, no programs, nothing but the barest and basest parts of himself.

"Yeah," he answered dully, after a quiet moment. What else could he say? They were going to do their best. Maybe PC'd be fine. Or maybe he wouldn't. Either way, it was entirely out of Mac's hands, and he swallowed hard and fought back a lurch in his processors as the technician coaxed PC onto the wheeled hand-truck he'd brought in with him.

"Uh…at this hour, the shop's closed, so we can't get started right away, but we're not too backed up and this isn't too heavy of an overhaul. Probably have it done same-day. Lemme just have you fill out this – here and here-" he indicated, passing some pre-fabbed, clipboarded sheet over to Mac. "-and we'll give you a call when we're all done." He felt weird, disconnected as he input name and IP and all those other necessary bits. He knew this sort of thing happened to PCs. People on his side of things gossiped like one big Apple sewing circle sometimes, and as was the nature of gossip, they never spared a negative about the Other Guy. Even when the Other Guy was Mac's Guy. So he knew. That wasn't making it easier, the way it seemed like it should have.

"Thanks," said the Geek as he passed back the mostly-completed form (it'd asked for all these personal details about PC, which made sense but had proved to be a little disheartening at points – Mac felt a distinct guilt at not knowing his actual processor speed, having always just categorized it as "prone to lags, but in kind of a cute way".) "We'll call you. Thanks for using Geek Squad."

Mac showed him out, dropped onto the couch, and didn't sleep that night.