Death of an Era

So my laptop died. Majorly. I was being my nerdy self and watching the latest episode of The Guild on Tuesday morning and all of a sudden, boom, colors invert, laptop freezes. I know what you're thinking. Macs don't freeze! They get the spinning wheel of death and are fine after 30 seconds! How is this possible? I wasn't too bothered by it, except that I had just gotten to a very interesting part in the episode and now had to reload it. What a nuisance!

Except simply restarting the machine didn't work. I got a strange screen. Striped green and pink-ish background with a small overlay telling me to restart. So I tried resetting a couple of things. Same screen. Well, it's Windows partitioned, let's boot it up with that. I can get to the screen that allows me to choose which OS to boot the laptop into, but if I try to boot Windows it restarts. How funky. I think it might be an issue with that. I take it to Tiger Tech. They tell me it's a motherboard issue. Right. Because Macs totally have motherboards (hint: Apple is far too hipster to use the term motherboard, even if they basically function the same). So I take it to Geek Squad who charges me 70 bucks and says they've fixed it roughly 24 hours later. And they have. I go to class and take notes and check Facebook and everything is good. Until I play a YouTube video (okay, tell me exactly when did Far East Movement become popular? All of a sudden they're everywhere and I'm kinda missing the days when they weren't b/c I liked them more). Then it does the same thing - inverts colors, freezes, after a reset I see the same screen.

So I go to Best Buy again and they set me up to have the thing shipped off and we're almost done when I ask how long it will take. Two to three weeks. I stare at the guy helping me. He's kidding, right? He has to be. He explains it's usually not a matter of diagnosing the problem, but more the obtaining of parts. I grab my laptop, say thank you, and walk on out of there. Well, not exactly, but basically. The guy gave me the number and location of the closest Apple authorized repair shop and refunded my money, but I did grab my laptop right out of his hands and said okay, thank you, I can't do that.

So now the laptop is at this random out of the way repair shop. They finally tell me the proper term for what my laptop is doing - kernel panic. It's most likely an issue with the video part of the logic board, which is a known defect on my particular model so they'll fix it for free. That's what I find out after 2 minutes of being there. I spent 10 minutes at Tiger Tech to have an ignorant person talk to me and at least 30 minutes at Best Buy working with 3 different Geek Squad members and I just open my laptop, show the front desk lady the issue, she flips the laptop over and checks the specific type and tells me all I need to know. And I go back less than a day later (about 50 hours after the official crash now) to get a few files off the laptop and the 2nd in command comes over and explains everything they're doing to my laptop. And tells me I should have it back on Monday. Or Tuesday. But most likely Monday.

Now I'm just worried that even though they'll fix everything (for free!) and none of the data has been corrupted that my laptop won't be the same. I love this laptop, even though it's a pain in the ass most of the time. I really need a computer to communicate with people. Any assignments from this week have been half-assed because I don't have my laptop. I don't have everything I need to do my job correctly. I need to be able to go home and organize my thoughts and email certain people asking certain things and I just can't do that when I'm in a computer lab. But what if I can't do that the same way after this logic board replacement?

So this is the death of the blog. Until Tuesday. Hopefully. Most likely.