Re: 6 October 2011 - I'm behind
I never had a problem with any of my Macs in the 1990's. I have 5 of them in my closet that still work. But during the 2000's it's been down hill. But that holds true for a lot of products I have had. I also have a lot of stuff that seems to have lasted forever. My last TV was over 15 years old when I gave it away a year or so ago and it was still working - Toshiba 28".
On the current iMac problem, the Cincinnati Apple store *finally* got to it late Thursday night. Apparently they have a service crew that works until 11PM. But - Now they say the logic board is OK. They say the video card is bad, that they ordered one Thursday night (none in stock, of course), which "should" come in Saturday, and if it does it *could* be ready Sat afternoon. But I know better than to believe that. So - It will be Monday earliest and my bet it will Tuesday or Wednesday.
I looked at some used Macs online, but they hold their value pretty well so none were cheap. I almost bought one that is *almost* identical to mine (US$1450! I paid US$3200 in 2008, but it was "maxed out on memory, fastest processor and all that) yesterday for delivery today, but backed off. Thinking Cap time for me. I'm revising my disaster recover/contingency plan to address a potential week downtime for a main server hardware failure. Working on my backup PC was put in for 48 hours and it's a real drag not having my main computer and having to use this PC for what will be at least a week. The age of the current machine also comes into play, so my hardware upgrade road map time line also has to be revised. In short, I have some thinking to do.
This is really weird. It's sorta like when I moved out here 15 years ago there were a fair number of electrical outages, several of which were more than 12 hours at a time. I have a 17KW generator now (of course since I put that in the electricity has only gone out a couple of times, the longest being 4 hours), but I remember when the electricity would go out and it was like "OK - Now what?" No TV, no computer, no refrigeration, no heating/cooling, etc. I still have an "emergency" supply of candles from those days! Here I am with triple data backups (not to mention a clone of my iMac drive *and* a Time Machine backup drive), but only 1 intel iMac so I can't access the programs and data I use every day. If a PC goes down I can use Parallels on my iMac to run PC programs that I use, but I don't have anything that works the other way. Bummer.
I guess I'm lucky I at least had the foresight to have a backup "emergency" PC configured with the basics to be able to send/receive emails, access and maintain the Elsmar site, etc. I just never figured on more than 48 to 72 hours to get a computer fixed. It's surprising to me how much I depend upon that single computer for every day things. Like when the electricity used to go out - One often doesn't realize the dependency until it's gone.
Well, I'm *hoping* I'll have it back by next Wednesday (5 more days) latest, but who knows. If I had taken it to ComputerDNA Thursday morning they would have diagnosed it and ordered the part overnight and had it ready for me Friday afternoon. I know the tech there and have talked with him about this. But it was late afternoon Wednesday (too late to get it to ComputerDNA before they closed) and I figured the Apple store was open late and would be just as fast. Wrong....
