Bugger
The magic smoke seems to have escaped from my laptop. Doh. God’s way of saying “hey, it’s time to review your backup policies”.
UPDATE 2003/11/03:
Well, I’ve had my laptop back for a while now. I’m not really convinced it’s as good as it used to be — it had a hardware crash for no apparent reason the day after I got it back (just powered right down) which worried me enough to spend all afternoon and most of the evening making backups over the network from single user mode. Yuck. On the upside nothing bad’s happened since.
Also on the upside was the warranty repair service. The only glitch was that Apple hadn’t put me down for the “AppleCare Protection Plan” I bought, which extends the warranty period from one year to three. Apparently the text on the warranty card that said “If you bought this direct from Apple, you don’t need to send in your registration card” actually meant “Apple in the United States”. As the woman who eventually answered the phone when I called the Apple freecall number said, “But how are you supposed to know that?” That all got worked out within an hour, happily, and Nextbyte were able to get the part and give me back my laptop within the next few days, without having me pay money. Yay! (Double yay, considering I was quoted something over $700 just for the part that needed replacing. Ouch.)
On the downside, Apple came out with G4 iBooks the day after I put my laptop in for servicing. Hrm. Surely it’s blasphemous for me to ignore a Sign of that magnitude? Certainly, sometime in the next six or seven months I’m going to have to succumb.
UPDATE 2003/11/11:
Ah. Well, it seems to have become clear exactly what the continuing problem is: the battery isn’t working right. After a while, the connection between the battery and the laptop seems to just fail, and if you happen to shift enough that the AC adaptor slips out from the slot on the laptop, as it occassionally does, *bzzt*, byebye session, hello fsck. It’s not entirely predictable, but the battery works far less often than not. Guess it’s time for another visit to the magic repair shop.