inluminent

I took the iBook to the Apple Store Genius bar the other day (they do diagnostics on broken stuff for free). After waiting a few minutes, the genius booted it up on his first try. I was stunned. Absolutely stunned. He smiled.

Then I said “do it again” (I’ve been trying to get it to boot up for a week now. It’s been a week since it last worked, and I didn’t know what was wrong with it. I’ve tried reseting the PMU, zapping the PRAM, all sorts of stuff… and it just wouldn’t boot).

He shut it down, and the tried to boot it up.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zip.

Zilch.

(you get the idea)

I was like “crap, wish I’d have burned a CD with my Quicken Data on it before you did that”. But I hadn’t.

He unplugged the battery, did all sorts of key-combination stuff, and said that it was probably the logic board.

My options were:

a) get the logic board fixed: $280
b) get the data burned on DVDs: $99.95 (cool that they’ll do this)
c) take it home, take the battery out, wait a week and see if it’ll boot, then burn the data onto a CD/DVD myself, then get it fixed
d) do nothing
e) buy a new Mac

I opted for e + c - a.

So, I bought an iMac G5. One of those new 20″ screen muthers. Man! Do I love that machine.

It’s super fast - the screen is huge - and it was a good deal. It’s got a 250GB Hard Drive.

But I drove to CompUSA to buy it. I’m tired of dealing directly with Apple for some reason. Maybe it’s because I bought AppleCare for my PowerBook, the same day I bought my PowerBook at an Apple Store, and they didn’t register my PowerBook’s AppleCare for me. I was supposed to do it myself, but they didn’t tell me… now I have an AppleCare card for the machine, and no AppleCare.

So, I bought the machine at CompUSA, added 512MB of RAM (for a total of 1 Gig - CompUSA would have installed it for $30, but I took it home and installed it myself, using these instructions), AppleCare, and picked up another year of .Mac for $30 off. All on 18 months, same as cash. I love debt!

I’ll eventually get the iBook fixed too, I think, because at the end of the day, it’s been a good machine, and if nothing else, I can probably eBay it for $400, so that’ll make the Logic Board fixing thing worth it.