No matter how ridiculous marcf is about the Mac – I still love it. However, in the past week I’ve had some really strange stuff happen to my Power Book. It’s not been pretty. Something has just gone completely wrong with the hardware driving the keyboard and mouse. It’s almost impossible to explain.
Put it this way. Typing this short blog post would be impossible. For every several letters, the mouse (and thus the focus) would jump to some other location randomly. Or, better, the “backspace effect” would happen. What’s that? Well, imagine if you’re typing away and then all of a sudden your last sentence just was erased and in a stroke, your next letters overwrote what you had just typed. Gosh, thank God for undo.
I think there’s some circuitry problem underneath the keyboard/mouse area. It started off about a month or so ago where my mouse area starting sticking. The nice little click you get when you press the pad was gone replaced with more or less a hard dull. Sometimes, I have to hit it pretty hard to get a click.
At this point, I’m taking my laptop in to a local Mac authorized repair center tomorrow. I’ve tried the Apple store before on a different problem I had (my internal fan died about 3 months ago) and it was useless. The store insisted I had to give them my computer for 2 weeks (best guess, maybe three they claimed) while they shipped it of to a regional center for repair. After jumping up and down and trying to explain to the store manager that my job depended on the laptop – she offered another solution. A wonderful little company here in Atlanta called Onyx Consulting.
I called Onyx and explained the situation. I told them, I absolutely couldn’t give my computer up while they shipped it off and asked what options did they have. They were very pleasurable with their response:
No worries. Just bring it in, we’ll check it out and if we require some parts we don’t have in inventory – we’ll order them and you keep the computer until they come in. Then, when they come in, just bring it in and we’ll repair it and give it back to you within a few hours.
Wow. That makes perfect sense. It’s under warranty and they’re an authorized repair center. Heck, even Dell will do on-site repair of your PC. And usually, their service sucks these days.
Unfortunately, in my current situation – my laptop is unusable. Luckily, there’s nothing wrong with the data or the physical hard drive or critical components. It’s just impossible to type more than a single character at a time without some delay between characters (like a very slow, deliberate keypress). Hard to blog or write software under those conditions.
So, I broke down, and got a backup Mac Book this afternoon. I figure I have the extended Apple Care Protection Plan so they’ll fix the problem. However, my guess is this problem will take some time (and maybe several iterations of parts replacement while they try to figure out the problem) and I can’t be without a functioning computer for that long.
However, no matter what, understand this: I absolutely will not buy (or use) a Windows Vista PC.
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