I took my MacBook Pro to Geek Squad in Best Buy this morning. The good news? I got to talk to someone within five minutes. The bad news? Within ten minutes the technician determined it was the mother board. She said it would cost $500 - $1000 and they would have to send it out.
Now comes dither time. Pay that and have something else go wrong in a few months. Buy a new one and have a warranty for another three years. Also, could my data be moved to a new computer? Yes, for $100. Would they recycle the computer? Yes. What about the security of my data on the hard-drive. They could take it out and I could get a case to make it a stand-alone hard-drive.
OK, I sprang for a new computer and put it into the Geek Squad's tender hands. The tech thought I could have it by Friday afternoon. I whipped out my credit card, paid up, and left.
More dithering on planning the weekend. We wanted to be at the cabin tomorrow. Did I want to wait to Sunday to pick up my computer? Dither, dither!
Mid-afternoon I got a call that my computer was ready. Jump in car and pick it up.
Now I am a happy camper. I just noticed that this one is a lot quieter and a lot cooler. I wonder if the heat of the other one destroyed the mother board over time. Could be.
I have also gotten back some data or features that stopped working for some reason on the other. Like Spotlight couldn't find anything anymore on my hard drive. The index just disappeared and the OS made no attempt to rebuild it, and I could find no magic button to do so. This afternoon this computer rebuilt the index in an hour or so.
But the worst thing of all were the withdrawal symptoms. All the writing and reading I do online was not available to me. I just couldn't get to deep into the newspapers. But I did read a couple more chapters of a book I've been reading. See "A word to the wise on compromise".
I still have to figure out which piggy bank to break to pay for all this.
