Return of the MacBook
Monday morning, first thing, I visited the Apple store on 5th Ave and talked to a genius. I couldn't get the MacBook to actually panic on demand, but given my story the guy wrote up a repair ticket. I looked at it as I walked out the store--logic board replacement. Whoo!
Now I wasn't worried about the computer, as I'd replaced the stock hard drive. But after two days, I realized that I couldn't just check my email on the web. I had stuff on my hard drive that I needed to get to. Things like Quicken. Things like contact management.
I sent a quick email around Google NY to see if anyone had a SATA to FireWire enclosure that I could borrow. No one did, which wasn't too surprising. So later that night I found the cheapest one (OWC's Mercury On-The-Go was only $90) and overnighted it. Oh well.
It arrived yesterday, and I dropped my hard drive into it. I was in business. I booted my work MacBook Pro from it, and settled back into my old computer.
This morning, I went to the Apple service site to track the repair. After a few tries (I have three Apple ID accounts), I found it, and was startled to see that it was overnighted yesterday. I followed the tracking number to find that it had been delivered. So I went to the mailing room to pick it up.
The repair summary? Yes, a new logic board. And a fan too. It's definitely the same machine, but they cleaned up the screen so that it shines like new. The factory hard drive is in there, but at least I could fsck from single-user mode and get repeatable answers.
I'll still be working from my work machine for now because the replacement memory is at home and I can't work in 512 megs. But the quick return of the computer was a complete (but welcome) surprise to me.
Yay!