How they can say it's fine when there are so many problems?

Question

I've had my Macbook barely a month, but I've taken it to the store twice for diagnostics, called Apple.com 3 times, erased and reloaded everything, and still have numerous issues despite being told 'it all checks out' and a 'replacement is not indicated'...it has more problems than my 6 yr old Compaq desktop...
It started 20 hrs after purchase when, aften shutting down, the sleep light apparently came on and overheated the computer. It could only be turned on again after taking out the battery. This has happened 4 times, despite being sure I'm proprerly signed out and the screen is dark before shutting. Then once it woulnd't boot up - just showed muclitple colored verticle lines...a call seems to have handled that, but the result is irregularly being able to access the internet, whether thru Safari or Firefox. The address shows in teh URL line but hte screen remains white and blank. Occasionally it freezes in an email, is very delayed in receiving or sending something or loading a page. It's not MSN or my DSL as my old computer is managing this well. It's been very frustrating as all my Mac firend told me how great they were...but I'm afraid this new version with the intel processor has bugs to get worked out. It's at the store as I speak and they tell me it checks out fine, tho I've spent hours dealing with each new bug...and I'm trying to start a business and can't afford the time these issues are taking! Any suggestions? REading the others comments, it doesn't sound like I'm the only one, but am not sure how to advocate at this point.

Answer 1

A few comments/suggestions:
It started 20 hrs after purchase when, aften shutting
down, the sleep light apparently came on and
overheated the computer. It could only be turned on
again after taking out the battery. This has
happened 4 times, despite being sure I'm proprerly
signed out and the screen is dark before shutting.
I've seen a couple of posts complaining of sleeping MacBooks not really sleeping and becoming very hot when closed. What others have suggested is making very sure that the sleep light is pulsing, to make sure its really asleep, before closing the lid. This is if your intention is to put the machine to sleep, not shut it down completely.
Your use of the term "signed out" makes me wonder if you mean "logged out". Once or twice I have seen my machine pop up a message after I try to log out, that some process has hung, and it refuses to go further. I would imagine there could be a problem if you close the lid in this state. (The process that syncs iDisk was the culprit in the instance I remember.)
If you've completely shut down the machine, I don't know how it could turn itself back on unless there's truly a hardware problem.
Then once it woulnd't boot up - just showed
muclitple colored verticle lines...a call seems to
have handled that, but the result is irregularly
being able to access the internet, whether thru
Safari or Firefox. The address shows in teh URL
line but hte screen remains white and blank.
The refusal to boot up and instead show colored vertical lines is allegedly a problem with OS 10.4.7, which may be permanently fixed by the next OS release.
To temporarily get it to boot, reset the PRAM/NVRAM by holding down the cmd-option-P-R keys while restarting until it chimes twice.
If the problem recurs, to make a fix that "sticks", once you're booted up, change your screen resolution to something else and back again. This writes to PRAM. This has worked for me.
Occasionally it freezes in an email, is very
delayed in receiving or sending something or loading
a page. It's not MSN or my DSL as my old computer is
managing this well.
If you're running many applications, especially CPU-hungry ones, with limited memory, you might have delays as your email or browser pages in and out of memory. However, I don't notice this on my machine with 512MB, like yours, running several typical apps at once. Running anything under Rosetta, like MS Office, will chew up memory.
Depending on your network hardware, you might try isolating to see if the problem is in your network setup. For example, if your DSL is connected to a router, try a wired ethernet connection straight to your DSL modem and see if the problems go away. Then work logically backwards.
The previous post from nazdarky is describing the "random shutdown problem", but I didn't get from your post that this is one of your problems.