A Blessing in Disguise?

As some of you know... my PowerBook's hard drive died back in late July.

Let me back up a bit... Last October the original 40GB drive began to fail. Thankfully, I was able to retrieve ALL of the info on the drive by using some strange rhythmic light banging on the powerbook while copying the files to an external drive. Not sure how it worked but it stopped the driving from slipping and I was able to save all of my data!

I sent my powerbook to iResQ to pop in a new 80GB drive and to swap out the combo drive with a super drive. The powerbook worked like new.

Fast forward to July. Hard drive died again. No warning. There were important files on that drive. I didn't know how much of it was not backed up but at the very least there were files on it that would take many Many MANY hours to reconstruct (iView data file, iPhoto data files, iTunes data files, etc.) and a bunch that could not be recreated ever. (pics, a years worth of e-mail, raw life poster files, etc.)

I procrastinated on getting it dealt with but after getting my iPhone the urgency to get a working Mac again surfaced. I sent the powerbook to iResQ again. A few days later they told me my hard drive was dead and gave me 2 choices...

1. Replace it under warranty but the dead drive would have to go back to the manufacturer to make it work.

2. Buy a new drive (at the slightly reduced price of $175) and they would send the dead drive back with the powerbook so if I want to send it to a data recovery company, I could.

Since I lost a bunch of data, I obviously chose #2.

A few days later I e-mailed to get a tracking number... a couple of hours later, I got this reply...

Craig,

Sorry for the delay, but it seems there are other issues going on
with the machine. Your hard drive and data are actually fine;
however, the ATA controller on the main logic board has failed,
making it impossible to read a hard drive. If you want to replace the
board, I can do so for just the cost of the part and drop the labor
charge, but it will still be $549.99. This should also resolve the
Bluetooth issue. If you would prefer, I can also return the machine
with the hard drive removed so you can get the data that is on it.
Sorry to have to bear the bad news- let me know how you'd like to
proceed. Thanks.

Eric
Apple Certified Portable Technician

There's no way I could justify spending $549.99 on fixing my almost 5 year old G4 Powerbook. So... my Powerbook is officially dead... yet I'm actually rejoiced by the fact that I didn't lose any data!

So they refunded my $175 and for a reasonable fee, they sent me back the laptop with the hard drive taken out and put into an external case.

What am I going to do with out a laptop? I don't know yet... I'm not even sure I'd buy another Mac Laptop... but I've had a laptop for over 10 years and I've gotten used to owning one. And with Dell's deals I could easily buy a brand new one for the price of the would be $549.99 repair.

A Dell while certainly not as stylish or as thin as an Apple, in the event I want to add more memory, a new hard drive or swap out a dead one, I could do it myself and not have to send it away.