Tales Of Brave Ulysses

I haven’t made much noise about it, but I went on a bender at Christmas, purchasing a couple Apple computers and an iPod. I’m writing this on my iBook G4, an excellent laptop that is quickly becoming indispensable to me. But I went a little crazy when I saw those beautiful iMac G5’s at the Apple Store in West County Shopping Mall at Christmas. It was easy to convince myself I need one; since my Dell PC was dead and my aging PowerMac G3 was on it’s last legs, I needed a new desktop computer. Why not go a little crazy and actually buy a new, worry free computer instead of my usual route of eBay castoffs and obsolete models. So I drank the Kool-Aid and bought a 20’ iMac G5.

Well, I started hearing rumors about how the iMac’s were prone to problems, overheating and bad power supplies being the most common. Sour grapes I thought. On Tuesday I was watching a bit of Quicktime video (no, not porno – the entire NOVA special The Elegant Universe is available online) when the iMac just switched itself off. Whump – game over man. Every attempt to turn it back on since then has been met with failure. It comes on for a couple seconds, starts the familar Apple ‘bong’ startup chord, then it stops. Tried Apple tech support chat, and it looks like I need a new midplane (logic board) or maybe a power supply.

You know, I just realized I never posted this story about the iMac G5. Well, the short story is – I got it working again, though it took several months. It was the power supply, and it only took about three days to fix. Regrettably I waited from April until August to get the computer repaired. Thankfully it was still under warrranty. In fact, just about the time I took it into the Apple Store in St. Louis, I got an email announcing the extension of the warranty program for the iMac G5 because of problems with the power supplies.

Why did I wait so long to get this computer, my pride and joy, repaired? Because I wasn’t about to pay to FedEx the computer back to the States for repairs. I checked it as luggage when I went back in August for a family wedding. So let this be a lesson to Guamanians that want a Macintosh; be prepared for troubles when the machine breaks.