My Macbook’s battery is finally dead, which means the book shuts down immediately if I unplug it from power. I accidentally pulled on the power cable yesterday, and as a result my usually rock solid Leopard OS started showing me instability of applications, and eventually the dreaded screen of death.

Luckily, I have time machine running and backing up everything. I rebooted on the OSX install disk, ran a repair disk through the Disk Utility, then restored a couple of the Application Support folders under my user folder that I found to have been corrupted (mostly stuff I had running at the time of the crash: Firefox, Mail, VLC, iTunes, etc.)

I am glad time machine worked as advertised. My last backup was done at noon, and the crash at 2PM so I haven’t lost anything.