Although it isn’t quite as bad with a Mac.

Robopsychosis ro-bo’-si-ko’-sis (n) ca. 1999 attr. John Mendillo (USA) 1. Condition or state of being wherein entire hours or days are spent attempting to troubleshoot or fix computer hardware or software, usually to no avail. 2. The inability to fix computer hardware or software. 3. The all-encompassing mental state of the technician while attempting to troubleshoot or fix computer hardware or software. 4. Extreme anxiety felt while troubleshooting computer hardware or software.

And I will admit it was all my own fault.

When I bought my MacBook Pro three months ago, I just got the base configuration (2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive).  I knew at some point I would need more RAM and a bigger hard drive, but it just wasn’t in the budget at the time of purchase.  This weekend, however, I finally bumped the machine to 4GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive.

Transferring data with a Mac is a breeze.  After I installed the new hardware, I booted from the DVD and reloaded the OS.  When it asked if I wanted to restore data from a backup, I said yes, and moved all my stuff over from Time Machine.  Everything was there as it had been on the old drive and it worked great with the added RAM, but unfortunately—as I’d discovered a couple months ago when I had to restore a backup—Photoshop now refused to run.

It’s my own fault, but it’s not hardware related in any way.  That’s all I’m going to say about it.

So I wiped the drive and reloaded all my apps from scratch.  The hardest (and most frustrating) part—since I’m still a newbie to Mac—was trying to locate where all my specific profile data (mail, address book, bookmarks, etc.) was actually kept so I could manually restore it from Time Machine.  All I can say is thank the FSM for the Google.

In a way I’m kind of happy that I had to do it this way, because I realized over the past couple months I’d loaded a whole lot of crap I just didn’t need, and doing this returned my MacBook to near pristine condition.  And I even learned a lot in the process.  Everything is working fine now, so while it was a little frustrating (okay, there was a lot of cursing involved) it was an overall success.