I made my very first trip to the Genius Bar in my local Apple store today due to the problems my MacBook Pro has been having. I considered live blogging it but in the end decided not to because there really wasn’t anything to share. I arrived on time for my appointment and sat next to three other Apple customers who were being served by Genius Paul, the only genius in attendance today. All three of the other folks were needing help with syncing their iPods and Paul was constantly having to explain how that process can go wrong.
When my turn arrived I was pleasantly served by Paul who asked me about the problems and I must say he actually listened and accepted what I told him I was experiencing and what I had done so far. No goofy scripts to follow by these geniuses, they take what you tell them in good faith and react accordingly. It was quite refreshing I must say. Hearing that I was sometimes getting 3 beeps at boot time Paul took out the two RAM cards in the MBP and swapped slots. My MBP has 3 GB of RAM with one card holding 2 GB and the other 1. He said sometimes just reseating them helps so swapping them was an attempt to rule out that possibility.
The first time he booted the MBP after swapping the memory hung up so he attached a portable firewire drive with every major version of Tiger and Leopard installed. This let him boot the MBP from his own version of Leopard so he could run some diagnostics that couldn’t be run otherwise. The very first thing he ran into was repeated disk errors that could not be repaired by the disk utility so the diagnosis was a bad hard drive. He never could get the memory diagnostics to run due to the disk errors so hopefully that’s my only problem. They didn’t have a 160 GB drive in stock so he had to order one that hopefully will only take a few days to come in. He offered to let me bring in my external Seagate drive to restore my Time Machine backup for me but I told him I’d do that myself. It was nice of him to offer to do that in any event. Hopefully I’ll have my MBP back soon so I can see if this fixes all of my problems running.
I have to say that I was impressed with the entire experience of bringing the system to Apple. They did exactly what I would have done in their position given the symptoms and what I told them I had already done. I never felt like I was treated like a newbie which happens at most shops, rather he listened and he let me become part of the investigation which was nice. Here’s hoping a happy ending is nigh. On the negative side they had no MacBook Airs to demo, they said stores won’t have them for another week and a half so if you want to see one for yourself you’ll have to wait.
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