Thank you Apple

Question

Say what you want about Apple, about the slight over-pricing of some of their products, about their policy of secrets, about their not always perfect record on reliability, but I just LOVE their customer service and it doesn't surprise me they always score very high in that regard.
Long story short, my beloved PB G4 was getting close to his 3-year warranty (in May) and after completing a paper for my research, I thought it was time to clean everything up and upgrade to Leopard and see if there was any issue. Not that I hadn't issues before with it Faulty logic board and battery recall did alter its original entrails but everytime it was well handled by Apple. For the last year or so however, I had more and more white stains on my screen, and judging by some of the threads over here, I wasn't sure that would fall under the warranty or not. I was decided that I would try my luck one of these days at the Apple Store, but I didn't know yet it would happen so soon...
So anyway, back to my Tiger cleanup, moving most of the media to my iMac, removing many unneeded apps, I went down to only 20GB on the drive with all my essentials research stuff.I usually back up my critical files using .Mac (thesis, papers,...) and before moving to Leopard, I wanted a clean bootable backup using SuperDuper and a couple of DVDs for the rest of my data... Well, can't say it went according to the plan ! 3/4 of the way through the SuperDuper backup, my PB hanged and I started to hear an awful clicking noise from my HD... A reboot attempt was unsuccessful and I started to accept the fact that I just lost my work drive... Scrambling through the partial SuperDuper backup and my previous backups, I made sure I more or less got everything essential. This was late Monday night, around 2an. Setup an appointment at the Genius bar on Tuesday morning, got some sleep and here I am at the Apple Store, with the helpful Genius booting from the network and making sure my drive is real dead. I briefly considered the 3rd party recovery option but I was pretty confident I had everything I needed scattered among my various backups. I did take the opportunity to mention my LCD screen issues, but the Genius was not so sure they would fix it. By 11am Tuesday, I had said goodbye to my PB, and I was not holding my breath of having it back for the week-end which was quite unfortunate as I was, for once, travelling across the country... What a good surprise at 2pm today to receive a phone call from the Apple Store, telling me my PB was ready for pickup 50 hours only after dropping it there.
Of course, I rushed there, signed the form, got my PB back and was anxious on the ride home to see if my screen had been replaced. By now, you probably have seen it coming, so yes not only do I have a new hard drive, but I also have a bigger hard drive (120GB against 80GB previously, I guess they just don't make 80GB drives anymore ) and a brand new LCD screen! Everything delivered in 50 hours, I'm quite impressed !
Going now for a clean Leopard install with case-sensitive formatted drive (I do a lot of Unix stuff and will not use this machine to do any Adobe stuff so I should be safe right?), I think my beloved PB will be rejuvenated !
Thanks for your time !

Answer 1

Hi Matthieu
Good news that it's all working so far. I've only had the PB a few days - just playing with it - my new toy . Next week I will be erasing the hard drive and starting fresh with Leopard.
I'm moving from my trusty old G3 Wallstreet Powerbook - 10 years old. A dramatic difference between the two.
I've been looking for a while for my specific G4 Powerbook - the very last model with hi-Res display and dual layer burning. I bought it off eBay here for AU $999 - that's about US $930. That price included a retail copy of Leopard.
Yours seems to be an earlier model.
I should point out that for my daily work (video editing, graphics, etc) I will still be mainly using my 8 year old G4 desktop.
Regards. Robert.