Hello, Guinevere

This weekend was an interesting test in patience.  Last Thursday, I found myself on the phone with Apple Care talking about my 3 year old G5 iMac and the fact that every time I tried to boot it up, it would kernel panic.  It took five attempts just to get in to the operating system on Thursday, and even then, after about 4 minutes, it went into a kernel panic and I had to restart again.  Apple told me to re-install the operating system.  The Apple Store told me it was probably a RAM issue and to try swapping RAM around.  Needless to say, I went with the Apple Store advice first.  Bingo!  My 1GB RAM module had gone bad.  Even better was the fact that the retailer I bought it from had a lifetime warranty on all memory they sell.  All it took was $1.85 to ship the RAM back to them and they were going to send me new RAM.  Perfect.

Then Saturday rolled around.  The same issue was happening, even without the bad RAM module.  Uh oh.  I made some efforts to do another backup of my desktop just in case, but after a few attempts, it was working again.  Sunday morning rolled around and it took 6 attempts to boot into the operating system.  I called my buddy Daryl to see if he had any ideas and we talked for a good 30 minutes just trying to figure out what was happening.  In the end, I decided (at Daryl’s suggestion) to call the Apple Store and see if they charged for hardware diagnostics.  They didn’t and I quickly had an appointment with someone at the Genius Bar for an hour later.

Now, for anyone who’s ever dealt with a G5 iMac, you know they’re a heavy beast.  So of course, I had to park half a mile from the mall.  Oh well.  I carted the machine in, checked in for my appointment, and was on my way to seeing what was wrong with my dear machine (named Lancelot for those of you confused by the title of the post).  The tech who helped me only need about 30 seconds inside the machine to tell me what was wrong: I had a handful of blown capacitors.  The only way to fix it was to replace the logic board at a whopping $900.  Um, no, especially considering that I was planning on replacing my desktop and laptop in 6 to 8 months.  I thanked him, packed up my computer, and headed home to mull over what to do.  It didn’t take long for me to realize what I was going to do: buy a new computer.

I knew exactly what model I wanted and I knew that I was going to manually upgrade the machine with a bigger and faster hard drive, plus double the memory.  I ordered the parts and decided that I was going to go get my new computer on Wednesday after an appointment for my car.  It’d be perfect.  Of course, I couldn’t wait that long, so on Monday, I went and bought my new 15-inch MacBook Pro.  I named her Guinevere in keeping with my Arthurian naming scheme (my wireless router is Camelot, last PC was Arthur, laptop is Merlin, iMac was Lancelot).  It’s so fitting too because Gwen is a beauty.  I don’t have the parts yet, but they’ll be in tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’ve been getting acquainted with Leopard and my new best friend.  (I had decided not to upgrade Lancelot and Merlin with Leopard when it came out, so I’ve been on the Tiger ship for a good long while now.)  Once I get the parts, I’ll swap ‘em out and start migrating all my data to this new machine.

So how have the first 24 hours gone?  It’s been sheer bliss.  I’m constantly struck by the awesome construction.  This is the first MacBook Pro to use the unibody enclosure and it feels a lot more stable and sturdy than my PowerBook.  The glossy screen is amazing.  Everything about it is just so well thought out.  I’ve watched the video on the manufacturing process four or five times already and am constantly amazed at the level of detail that went in to designing this machine.  I’m sure I’ll spend the next few days discovering new things about this machine, but it’s probably the best purchase I’ve ever made (and definitely one of the most expensive too) … but in the end, so worth it.