First of all, I would like to say that through all of my powerbook troubles, I still love my mac!
I bought my 15" Powerbook G4 about 18months ago and I've had quite a bit of trouble with it.
The powerbook itself hasn't had a hard life, it's not pushed to it's limits everyday, it's never been dropped, or had any spillages on it.
The trouble started about 3months after I bought it. I was doing a full system wipe and restore using the provided system discs. The powerbook didn't seem to like this and when it restarted after the install it just stayed at the grey load up screen flashing the "happy apple" logo. I phoned apple and they took my powerbook back for repair. I believe it was either a hard disk or ram failure.
The next thing to happen was my 8x Superdrive started making strange burn patterns on the cd's and dvd's it was burning. The discs where either unreadable in other machines but ok in my powerbook or mostly just burn failures. At first I thought I had a bad batch of discs but after trying every decent and expensive brand on the market and still getting the same results I thought it then had to be the superdrive itself.
While I was still trying to work out if the superdrive was faulty my LCD screen started to play up too. It started to go dull for a few seconds and then come back to full brightness. Then a black band appeared down the right hand side of the screen. It eventually went dark, all the colours where messed up and still had a black band down the right hand side of the screen. I had a spare external monitor so I hooked into it to see if my external output worked. Thankfully it did! I was able to backup all my stuff onto an external drive, and then I telephoned mac again. They sent me to a local repair centre and they where able to replace both of these parts.
Now just this weekend my lower ram slot has just decided to stop working. The only way to have this fixed is to have the logic board replaced. I have had this quoted by a local repair centre and they are telling me that this is going to cost £750 ($1,284.30)!!!!! My powerbook probably isn't even worth that anymore!!!!!
I'd like to think that I'm the only one who has had this many faults with their apple in such a short space of time. I'm considering contacting apple and seeing if they are willing to accept some responsibility as I am convinced that my powerbook has not been right from the start. I won't hold my breath though!!
Any advice out there? any one else had any similar experiences? Any positive outcomes?
I'd appreciate any advice.
Thanks.
Al.
Top
