You may have noticed a certain paucity of posting. Most of this has been due to my laptop having problems. The screen fritzed out on the 4th of July in the wee small hours, which required me to go to pick up a few spare hard drives for backups before I could take the thing in to Tekserve for repair.
I was told it would be ten days, that this was a know problem with this model of iBook, and that they would pick up the cost. In the meantime, I’ve been muddling through on backups and my old iMac, which is showing definite signs of aging (dead Firewire ports, dying CD-Rom drive).
I got a call from TekServe on Thursday, the day I was supposed to get it back. Apple claims the problem is theoretically the hard drive, not the normally defective logic board. Hence $350 to repair, erasing my hard drive, and I don’t get it back until next week. If I decline the repair, Apple charges me $200 for a diagnosis fee anyway and I have a white paperweight.
I find this a tad hard to believe. The hard drive worked well enough after the monitor went for me to boot it as an external hard drive (which these laptops can do) and I was able to perform a complete backup. So I’m a bit incredulous.
If I’m lucky, they’ll zap it and discover that the logic board is the problem anyway. Then at least I won’t have the money hit, just the joy of restoring a hard drive and synching it with the last two weeks of work. And hoping that I can get to some of the passwords I’ve forgotten…