My Mac is back…

My Mac is back!

No, not the website, it did not go anywhere, but my personal PowerBook 17″ has returned from Apple Service in Houston.

For those you read here all the time, you probably know I was having some problems with my PB and wake from sleep, some bright spots on my screen, and a broken shift key.

It was supposed to go into Apple 3 weeks ago, but I could not seem to break it free from my hands. So I called Apple to see if it was still OK to send it in on the repair order. While they said yes, a VERY helpful person (must have been an ex-Dell employee) at Apple decided to cancel the order and have me start over. Why? Well, seems when I described the problems to him again, he did not like the way it was written up on the old order, so felt it should be re-submitted. A new box arrived on my doorstep two days later.

It took me almost a week to back it up, because I wanted to use Retrospect, a product I have been using for years to do daily backup. The advantage is that IF anything changed before I sent it off, a simply incremental backup would catch only those few changes. And that is what happened for almost 3 weeks. And it seemed to work well for the most part. Ok, almost! See my review coming soon as backing up a whole Mac onto DVDs (80 GB’s worth fits on 19 DVDs) was not a fun experience, took a rather long time, and while it did the job, when it reached the final DVD it needed, it reported a hardware failure (which there was not) and aborted on the 19th DVD, leaving it useless. A recovery and rebuild still did not convince me that it worked completely, and it refused to continue with that backup set. (More on that product in a full review of Retrospect coming soon. It is an excellent product that works great, but when it goes bad, it is a pain.)

What to do? Well, I broke down and bought a LaCie 160 GB Firewire HD from CompUSA (right next to my office at work) for all of $130 or so, and did a full Carbon Copy backup to that drive. I put the Mac in the box and off it went, Friday, 02/04/2005. They told me it could take up to 2 weeks to get it back.

Carbon Copy told me that the backup drive would be bootable. It was not. I tried to use it on my old G4 Tower; it did not work as expected. I could not repair it and it would not let me install a new OS to that drive either. Why? I have no clue. So, I was not on-line with my old files on my G4. Sigh. Work gave me a Dell to use in the meantime, and while I do not mind XP so much (as I have said), it was no Apple PowerBook!

But imagine my surprise to find a box at my door this evening when I returned home from work. WOW! OK Apple, I take back most of the nasty things I have said about your service, this was amazing. It has a new, bright, clear display, a new motherboard (according to the work order), and what feels like a new keyboard, even though it says they only replaced a keycap. But as amazing as the speed in which it came back is the thing came back with ALL my software and files right where I left them, so I could hit the ground running. That is even more cool.

That means I have a few days to catch up moving files from my G4 and Dell back to this PB, and I will be back on line here with some new reviews for products from Macworld very soon.

See you in a bit…

-Owen-