[miffed]

Hard drive failure now :D

Of course , a quick google search brings up thousands of similar cases - it is one particular HDD that is causing all the problems

Good news ? Seagate offer a 5 year guarantee !

Bad news ? Their guarantee is to Apple. you need to go through Apple, who won't entertain the idea unless you are under guarantee with them !

Still , I am sure (in fact I know !) you will all agree that two new keyboards / top casings / cables - (one badly discoloured , one split pus a faulty cpnnection to the motherboard) , a new power adapter (old one melted) and a failed hard drive are all part of the course of owning a laptop for 18 months ;)

Y'know I found it hard to believe that they started Apple in Steve's garage originally - but now I can quite believe it :D

Suppose I have to find a replacement - will a decent hard drive work in an Apple machine or do you have to make sure it's a 4th rate one ?

[Hands0n]

Oh ...... my ....... gawd! Are you cursed or what? :eek:


Still , I am sure (in fact I know !) you will all agree that .... Actually, no, I wouldn't agree at all. That is completely unacceptable in my book. I have never had a laptop, Apple or some third-world piece of cr*p from a famous large PC distribution chain in the UK. FFS, even my Aria unbranded Chinese DGM lappy has functionted faultlessly in the 18 months that I have had it. Its not even got a scratch on the case, well at least not until I handed it over to the Mrs since I got my Macbook Pro.

No amount of "No but, yeah but, no but, yeah ....." from Apple or anyone else will convince me that what you have is normal and acceptable experience of any product, let alone Apple.

Any suitable HDD will work in the Apple - they use industry-standard components these days. And no-one in their right mind manufacturers using a HDD that is custom-built for them! Go for a strong brand HDD that has a good reputation, not necessarily in Apple Mac kit.

Most of the surviving large American IT companies started in someone's garage or spare room. Given the state of the art in the 1970s, there was no other real option. Large companies of the day would not have understood the technology (don't forget IBM Corp thought they'd only sell 100,000 desktop PCs worldwide, ever!).

[Ben]

Sucks about your HDD. Seagate wont be providing a 5 year warranty to Apple, it'll be more like 1, so you're out of luck there. Seagate drives are generally very good, though, so it's just your luck :(

Email your full start-to-finish experience to [email protected]. Some people reckon the address is [email protected], so you could email to both. There are lots of reports of Apple contacting ultra-peeved 'Dear Steve' Mac users and replacing their lemons. And lets face it, there are a lot of MacBook lemons out there.

Edit: am also seeing [email protected] around.

[miffed]

I am not one to back things up generally , only really important stuff , so I am pleased that I recently backed everything up for the leopard install (and then back to tiger ! - plus the fact that I keep all the important stuff on both machines for double safety

Now, I know the golden rule is "avoid PC world at all costs" - and I could probably have picked up a far better price online - but I like to sort things out NOW !! (not tomorrow ! ) ...and there aren't many places to pick up a Hard drive on a Sunday afternoon !
I am therefore £109 lighter , and the Macbook is up and running with one of these
http://www.pcworld.co.uk:80/martprd/store/pcw_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1831087312.120024215 0@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccejaddmmljfglkcflgceggdhhmdfoi.0&page=Product&fm=null&sm=null&tm=null&sku=367229&category_oid=-31457

OK so I got angry and all that - but just between you and me , the macbook needed a bigger HD anyway - the 60GB was filling up , and I wanted to have a Boot Camp partition , which wasn't really practical - so it was an upgrade that needed doing anyway TBH

I'd rather have chosen the time to do it myself though !

[miffed]

oh and BTW , has anyone seen my other 18gb ? - this 250GB drive only has 232GB on it
I noticed the lad picking his nose behind the tech counter - I bet he had something to do with it !

[chaslam]

Well I work for PC World and everyone knows, including me, that you can find pretty much everything in there cheaper online. Despite the expensive prices, the staff (in my store anyway, not sure what its like in any other store) actually do try their dam best to make the customer happy and alot of the staff are actually quite knowledgeable (again, in my store they are anyway, including me hehe).

[Hands0n]

oh and BTW , has anyone seen my other 18gb ? - this 250GB drive only has 232GB on it
I noticed the lad picking his nose behind the tech counter - I bet he had something to do with it !

That 250GB is the unformatted capacity of the physical hard drive. Once you take the bits (thats those teensy weensy ones and zeroes) that make up the disk format and sectoring you get left with 232GB. How much gets used is directly proportional to (a) the overall size of the HDD and (b) what type of disk filesystem is used (i.e. DOS, NTFS, Unix, Mac OS Extended, Mac OS Extended Journalled). The more elaborate the filesystem, the more disk capacity is used to implement it.

Unfortuantely, in this instance, we cannot lay blame at the PC World spotty yoof at the tech counter :D

[Ben]

Note that the 250GB is where a gig is 1000 megs and a meg is 1000 kb's etc... the computer works in lots of 1024, not 1000, so yeah - we're all being ripped off :D But that's just the way it goes!

[miffed]

Well this is interesting

The macbook seems much better with Leopard now , no wifi problems at all !

How on earth can a Hard drive affect the Wi-fi ? Answers on a postcard ? ... :rolleyes:

[Hands0n]

Errr I didn't think to ask at the time but could you have been running low on disk space. All manner of strange things can happen as you approach the capacity of the HDD.

Mind you are on a completely clean install of Leopard :)