All's well that ends well

Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the table eating breakfast and browsing the news on my Powerbook, as I am want to do. In front of me was my bowl of cereal, and to my right, the carton of milk. And just beyond that, my two year old daughter.

You can probably guess what happened next.

The milk went over the front half of the Powerbook, luckily missing the keyboard and speakers. It still seemed to work ok, so I mopped up, packed up and went to work.

When I got there, I noticed the lid catch was a little sticky, but it opened ok and still worked. At the end of the day, I shut the lid and came home.

This was when things turned bad. That evening, I opened up the Powerbook to check my email, and was more than a little disturbed to find the bottom two thirds of my screen didn’t work. Like, it was black. And then, it wasn’t black, but wasn’t being refreshed. weep

I found that by moving the screen back and forth, I could usually get it to come good, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. It seemed get better the longer it was on… probably heat related. But it was pretty much unusable when first fired up.

The service guys at my local AppleCentre had a look, and were suitably impressed. They thought it might just be a loose connection, since the screen cable runs down to the front to connect to the logic board. Or it could be a fried logic board, which would only cost about AUD2,500 to replace. Sigh

Anyway, they booked it in, and called me on Wednesday to say they had time to look at it. So I took it in yesterday. I spent a nervous day working on my linux box, and hardly ever checking the Apple site to review the specs of the newly announced upgraded Powerbooks…

That afternoon, they called with the good news… There was nothing obvious wrong with the hardware, so they just stripped it down, cleaned everything up, re-seated the connectors and put it back together. And that seemed to do the trick. :-D

So now I have my baby back, and it seems as good as new. A happy ending to a potentially disastrous story. And now I make sure there is a good distance between open milk cartons and children.