Computer Stuff

Way back in Oct 2007 I bought The Lovely Harvey a spiffy new 15" MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz). This was a twin to mine that I had bought in May 2007.

The video on mine failed in May of 2008 just days before its warranty expired. Apple repaired this machine, but thanks to the repeated warnings of possible data loss and up to 90 day turn-around on repairs I ended up getting a new machine (just in case) too. Three day turn around, no data loss. "Well, at least we have a spare," I thought.

Good thing we did. In February ago The Lovely Harvey's laptop died exactly like my first one did. Since we were well out of warranty there was much despair; but since we had the spare...

Her machine would fire up in target disk mode so I could transfer the data from her machine to the spare. I did a fresh install of OSX 10.5 onto the spare and then moved her stuff over. Simple.

The old machine got tossed into the closet until we had the $500-$900 to fix it.

Fast forward to yesterday.

I was talking with Anglave about his ancient work laptop and joked around that he should just get a new one. Ha ha. I then suggested a Mac, you know even more money he didn't have. Then I suggested he fix our broken one since the repairs were almost the same as a new Win7 machine. He expressed doubt that those price comparisons were correct, surely a logic board would be more.

So I googled to find some prices for logic boards and found:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/MacBookPro_video_failure.html

That led to
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377

Whereupon I discovered that the repair would likely be covered for free.

It is now 8 PM. There is an 8:40 appointment slot at the Genius Bar available 37 miles away. To the Jalopy! Triple digit speeds were achieved several times and the Escort 8500 paid for itself at least three times. I made it to the Apple Store with minutes to spare.

The Genius™ ran a diagnostic and confirmed it was the GPU. He then gave me a receipt, warned of data loss and slow turn around and all will be well.

Side Note: Coming out of the Apple Store I picked up a tail. Two thuggish looking guys were loitering outside the entrance to the store and followed me back to the car. They broke off when they saw that I was alert, looking at them and had my hand in my pocket. And by "broke off" I mean they did a 180˚ and went back into the mall.

Additional Side Note: The Genius™ got a kick out of my "I'm Not Carrying A Concealed Firearm (Or Am I?)" t-shirt. The charitable side of me would like to think that the thugs just wanted to read my shirt and having done so went back to loitering.