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Time for your seasonal laptop breakage.

schwern on 2005-11-06T07:12:03

Yep, iBook's down again. Logic board failure. Again. Last one was August.

*sigh* What's this, seven repairs in three years? Applecare ends January. After that I'm hosed. I'm torn as to whether I'd buy another Apple laptop again. On the one hand, everything has always been fixed without question and speedily. On the other hand, seven failures. Mostly the logic board. Usually resulting in about a week's downtime. On the gripping hand, OS X so shiny.

So today has been occupied with scraping my PC back together. I had reinforced Rule #1 of Computer Repair: Is it plugged in? After everything was assembled I flipped the switch on the power supply only to have it power on for a second then power down. After pulling every peripheral I could and getting really frustrated I finally realized I hadn't plugged the case power button into the motherboard. Whoops.

Only my primary drive appears to have developed a severe twitch such that I had to junk it. Lacking a bootable Windows disk, or even a recent Linux disk, I was forced to go with Lindows. Its the only thing on hand. I'm temporarily hijacking a wired network connection off a laptop to update it to Debian standards. Then its the fun of figuring out how to get Linux to see a wireless card and speak WPA.

Joy.

UPDATE Got the machine back, from the time the shop sent it out to Apple to getting it back was about 24 hours. Unfortunately, the shop took a few days getting it out. It worked great for about a day, now it won't run without A/C power. *sigh* Back to the shop it goes.

PowerBook

Theory on 2005-11-07T01:02:23

Dude, get a PowerBook instead of an iBook. They don't seem to have the logic board problems.

—Theory

Re:PowerBook

schwern on 2005-11-08T04:44:39

Yes, merely semi-annual LCD failures. :P

FWIW I'm getting a Zero Shock inner bag with the hopes I'll avoid future post-warranty failures.

Apple Laptops

ziggy on 2005-11-07T17:15:09

Instead of focusing on the seven repairs, focus on the three years.

Seriously. iBook and PowerBook users tend to be very hard on their machines. It's amazing that they last so long, and that they're still useful after their three year lifespan. It's not uncommon to replace lesser laptops every 12-30 months, or have it become so unbearably slow that the best option is to toss it out the window and just buy another one. It's also not uncommon that dealing with the manufacturer gets to be so unbearable that the best way to save your sanity is to buy a new laptop from another vendor.

My iBook just went off-warranty, and it started developing some grounding issues. Could be static electricity because of the rug and wintry weather, or it could be symptomatic of something more dire. It went back for repairs 3 times in 3 years (and they could never replicate the randomly failing backlight), but I'll get another mac laptop once the stars are properly aligned.

Re:Apple Laptops

schwern on 2005-11-17T22:58:53

Normally I'd agree, but my original G3/800 iBook was such a lemon that they gave me a G4/1ghz back in October. So I essentially have a year old machine.