Date: 2007-07-13 17:19 Subject: Persistence pays off!!!!! Security: Public Tags: apple, sheer bliss

So today I learned if something is truly not right, truly messed up, but you stick with it and see it through (and annoy the absolute hell out of the people who can make it right), then you will be rewarded. Two Logic Board replacements, two batteries, a power cord and an optical drive later, I have a new computer. Around midnight last night, my computer utterly crashed. Probably the worst of its failures since that first Logic Board failure back in November - the battery fried, the drives whirred, and the computer continued to power down after every attempt to boot.

I was positively livid. It had been less than a month since my last repair. So I got the computer back online long enough to send off a few chapters of Dark!Fic to lazaefair because it was one of the things I didn't have backed up, and I was really scared I wouldn't get the computer stable enough to plug in the external hard drive. Once that was taken care of, I ripped into the machine and realized the problem was the power brick all along - yeah, Mac Geniuses, battery issues my ass. The computer was running hot enough to fry an egg on, so I let it cool and collected all its gadgets - wireless remote, power cords, etc. - and boxed the fucker back up. I walked into my Genius Bar appointment today, plopped the box down, and informed them they would be replacing my computer.

And they did.

But here's now I know that there was something truly wrong with the machine - the Creative Suite disks I had so much trouble installing on the last machine? Flawless install this time around. The issues I had linking the computer to my external Companion 3 speakers? Gone. And best of all, they went ahead and gave me a "comparable upgrade" rather than a refurbished machine. So I lost my high speed hard drive (I had a custom config on the last) but gained 60 gigs of storage I desperately need for video editing. I also upgraded from the 2.0 Core Duo to the 2.6 Core 2 Duo, and doubled the RAM. Beautiful, and I feel like a long-deserved resolution to the sheer number of hours I devoted to dealing with Apple over the last eight months (since the first problem appeared - honestly, that first faulty Logic Board destroyed the whole machine).

Plus, they're going to pro-rate the 22 months of Apple Care I had left, so at least I'll get some kind of a return on that $300, and allow me to use whatever I get back towards the purchase of a three year warrenty for this machine. Eeeeee!!!!!!

Edit: Friday the thirteenth must not be that unlucky, because in addition to my new computer, my brother finally got his car back! To recap, he hit a deer on his way home from our house about 2-3 weeks ago in his Mustang. Then, to add insult to injury, though it went to a very reputable body shop, the people managed to park a severely damaged Mercedes without wheels in the slot next to it. When they took the Mercedes out to repair, they managed to scrape the damn thing down the side of Matt's car. (The same people, though miracle workers of the automotive sort, also dropped a hot tub on his '91 BMW 3-series a few years ago.) But the car looks great and my computer is running excellently, so we're both pretty happy at the moment!