On Saturday, my iBook returned home after its little trip to the Apple service center.
The good news
Apple performed the service for free, even though this computer is out of warranty. Along with the logic board repair, they upgraded the DVD/CDRW combo drive to a faster version and cleaned the screen (it had been very dusty.)
The bad news
For some reason the hard drive was replaced and none of my data came back with the computer. I was specifically warned about this, so I was not surprised or disappointed, but merely annoyed. The OS was downgraded to 10.2, which required me to reinstall 10.3 and its various updates before reinstalling applications and restoring my data.
The logic board repair did nothing: the display scrambled again within the first couple hours of use. The replaced hard drive clicked loudly from the outset until it died, less than 24 hours after I received the computer. So not only did my computer come back not fixed, but in worse condition than before.
So, back to service goes my iBook and I remain stuck for another week or so using the large and slow Windows laptop or the even larger and slower Mac desktop. So blogging will likely remain light in the absence of my typical OS X setup.1
At least I am in good company in the missing Mac department. Declan McCullagh has been without his Powerbook for 3 weeks, but obtained a replacement PowerBook from Apple today.
And the ugly
The new combo drive door doesn’t match the vintage style on the casing.
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1Actually, the frequency of posts may not decrease at all, but the incidence of spelling misstakes will certainly increase.
