Apple Care

My screen was acting funky and the hard drive was extremely noisy so I decided to take advantage of Apple’s Apple Care warrantee and I sent my laptop somewhere to have it fixed. The express company with the yellow truck showed up with a special box. I did my back ups (or so I thought), and shipped the Powerbook away. It was back in four working days. Amazing really. Apple replaced the entire screen and slammed in a new hard drive. This means, of course, that all my information, data, photos, music, etc. was gone, hopefully hidden somewhere on my Lacie external hard disk, iPod, or in iDisk, Mac’s on line back up program. The first thing I noticed was that, while Apple had loaded an operating system onto the machine, it didn’t include a photo, movie, or DVD program, all of which are part of a suite Apple calls “iLife.” I tried reloading the software but still no photo application. This morning I called Apple and talked to a nice lady named Sabrina. She was in Niagra Falls and she was cold. 7 degrees up there. Sabrina tried to do a “workaround.” It didn’t work. So, on behalf of Apple she offered to send me a DVD with iLife on it. Getting this organized took another call and another fifteen minutes. But the Apple folks were universally polite and helpful. They are obviously well trained. Canada, it seems, is a smart place for the service center.
So, far I’ve been able to retrieve my document files and music. But those photos, old mail files, addresses and financial records are still in limbo. Linda didn’t sleep worrying our 7000+ photos (6000 of which are of grand kids) are lost. I discovered that other applications that I had purchased and downloaded can be quickly retrieved by going to the appropriate web site and proving one’s identity through email. One is given a new identifier and the application can be downloaded again. All in all this experience is the same as getting a new computer except you can’t dump from your old hard drive to a new one. I expect I will find that I didn’t back everything up properly though, hopefully, I will be surprised. I’m hoping to have a Mac genius come over to walk me through some of the protocols for retrieval and, at the same time, clean out all the crap I don’t need. So far today, I’ve spent eight hours on this little mess which could have been a real disaster without the backups I did manage to accomplish. These computers really save lots of time. UPDATE: Lenny Neimark The Mac Man here in Ashland put my computer back the way it was. I had backed things up correctly. Lenny shared this haiku with me: Three things are certain— Death, taxes and lost data. Guess which has occured. Fortunately for me it was taxes.