Settling in for long haul

I better start with a "Days with no PowerBook joy" count... it failed a week ago today, so I lost all of 6/12 thru the start of today 6/19 so that's 7 days down and today is day 8. Recapping the events... it failed on Monday 6/12, took me until Wednesday to get it down to the Mac Store for repair, they shipped it out Friday and will proceed with trying to fix it and/or be sure it needs parts or service from Apple, even as I wrangle my AppleCare warranty.

I faxed my receipts and AppleCare agreement number to Apple on Wednesday. They alerted me Friday, somehow the agreement was attached to a machine with serial number one character different than mine. I'd have liked to think with a S/N as long as X12345ABCDE that there'd be a checksum in there somewhere such that Y12345ABCDE wouldn't be valid, but apparently not. I replied with the correct number and hopefully they'll soon mark this incident under warranty.

As I blogged earlier, I showed the symptom to a local Mac Store tech who confirmed my suspicion that the problem is on the graphics memory on the main logic board. And also as I blogged earlier, the problem "went away" while I was doing backups (same as the first time). So I wasn't surprised when I got the call from the technical support group today...

They don't see any problem with the machine! Further, they seemed surprised I erased the hard drive prior to sending it in for service. We discussed and agreed, they'll restore a basic system to the drive and see if they can make it fail.

Meanwhile miniRW does keep me going. I've pulled all the non-essential stuff out of the startup group and it's better. Not great, but better.

So that's what I know on Day 8. To be fair, it's only day 1 in the hands of tech support and I really hope the numbers don't get so big that this discrepancy doesn't matter.

Settling in for long haul

Monday, Jun 19 at 12:12 PM