CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

I bought my MacBook pro in September 2007 and I loved it til early afternoon of today – 20.8.2008.  The reason I bought it was is this story http://www.chrillo.info/2008/08/20/the-nightmare-…stomer-supportthe-nightmare-of-sony-vaio-customer-support/

I was working on a web site then closed the lid while having lunch. When I opened the lid back up the screen stayed black. Nothing helped. No pram reset, no five seconds on the power button nothing.

Reading up on apples support pages at least gave me the comfort of knowing that there are hundreds of people with the same problem but again no working fix. Some people posted that they could fix the problem by deleting the sleepimage file via ssh.

The I called up apple tech support where a very friendly guy told me to do all the resetting that I had already done. Well since apple does not offer pick up service I will travel to Vienna tomorrow in order to visit one of apples service partners – mc shark that is.

I am very interested to see whether the apple care plan was worth the money or not and if this broken laptop will become the same nightmare as my last Sony notebook, which died last summer and took me five months of fighting with Sony tech support.

I will update this post as the continue my experience with apple tech support.

Update I:

Not even 24 hours after I talked to apple tech support I received an email with a little 5 question survey on the quality of the support. This at least gives you the feeling they care about their support and I credit apple for that.

Update II:

okay i took my laptop to the store today. the whole process did not take longer than two minutes and I was promised that I would have my working macbook pro back within 4 to 7 business days. So far so good. No comes the part where they can really prove that apples service is worth the extra cash.

Update III:

got a call from the service company that my macbook pro was ready to be picked up, only seven days after I took it there. tomorrow I will pick it up and make a final comparison of apple and sony.

Update IV:

today I picked up my macbook pro. Its working, the data was still on it, there was no charge. just nice! This is how service should look like.  The technical solution to the black screen problem is to change the mainboard. there is no software way of fixing this problem.

Update V:

got an email from apple with a small survey about the service. it gives you at least the feeling they care a bit.

Now that I have my home server up and running I was really interested in the new microsoft home server. I ordered a 120 day trail dvd, which i finally received after weeks of waiting. The rest of the story is rather short.  I put in the DVD, started the installation, and at the screen with the country and language settings the drop down boxes were empty. When clicking on proceed button the Installation just crashed. Restarting, cleaning the DVD, reformatting the Harddrive … no chance. Sad, I really wanted to try this.