Not that I want Gruber to turn his snark deathray on me, but this is dumb: AppleCare or any extended warranty may be gambling but not all gambling is fixed in the house’s favor. For my AppleCare expense ($249, I think it was), I have gotten:
- a hard drive replaced
- whatever components made the backlight flicker replaced
- a new logic board (actually, I think they did this twice, once with the backlight issue)
- a new case top (including trackpad).
At this point, this iBook has about as many original parts as an airliner after a few major services, ie, not many. And the service is very fast, like 2-3 days, door to door, since they do all their depot repairs at the airport in Memphis, not in California.
I think I won. I would certainly buy the same plan again.
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My TiVo adventures continue. The drive that came with the system is dead, it was spinning up but not reliably. I was able to re-image it (InstantCake, anyone?) but it failed to complete a boot and system upgrade. So I bought a replacement drive, a 160Gb drive ($49), at Fry’s/Outpost.com and we’ll see how that goes. Seems like a fair amount of work for a guy who hates television 😉 but I hope it will allow us to see stuff we do like (baseball season is coming up) at the times we want to see it.
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The cat we are hosting from Kyrgzstan is coming up on the end of her 6 months with us, or so we thought. Turns out the vet we took her to didn’t know the regs, so we now get to start all over from scratch. The USDA makes all this available — we got the straight dope from a friend who is a vet — but it’s no good if you never consult it. So we’re out some duplicated expenses, it seems, as well as have to sorely test the goodwill of the folks we’re doing this for.