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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Linda Kaplan who wrote (11211)	4/14/1998 4:41:00 PM
From: X-Ray Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Very sorry to hear about your recent experience with servicing your PB. But just catch your breath, say a mantra, and patiently work through this. Obviously, something has gone wrong somewhere, and the droid you are dealing with is just doing their job. You say it went to Apple repair all times, and I presume you mean Apple proper, not a representative. If you know for certain you were not running a G3 just prior to failure, obviously they have confused things there now, and the supervisor is going to have to get to the bottom of the problem internally before getting back to you. Keep us informed.

To: Linda Kaplan who wrote (11211)	4/14/1998 7:10:00 PM
From: Dylan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213173

Linda, I had a really bad set of experiences with Apple back in 1995 when I bought a PB 520c. It spent about six months of its first year at Apple repair. Everything that could've gone wrong with it did (Memory failure, motherboard failure, monitor falling apart from the keyboard, keyboard damage, batteries failing to charge, system crashes all the time,....). All of that with a $3700 price tag. After a year, it had lost more than half its value and I didn't get to use it for half the time. The problem with the monitor took 3 months to fix and Apple even mailed my computer to the wrong address on one occasion. It probably would've been a little better if I hadn't taken the computer to Comp USA some of the time, but I have vowed to never buy a top of the line computer again. Now, my research lab is constantly buying new computers so I don't have to pay for one and can enjoy near top of the line all the time. We use both platforms which is nice. Still, I know that people have severe problems with Wintels. For example, we've had to reinstall Windows NT 4 on three PCs this year which is a several day task since there are so many drivers and patches that must be downloaded. Right now I still feel that Apple is the better of two evils, but they are still not the company they once were. It is Steve's Job (nice pun, eh?) to restore the quality product and service they once delivered. -Dylan

To: Linda Kaplan who wrote (11211)	4/16/1998 9:45:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Linda, A friend of mine operates a repair depo and they had crooked techs who stole parts etc, and sent the stuff back to the clients. The smoke thing sounds like a detached component moved and shorted. They can trace that motherboard by bar code and see where it came from and follow those pathways to find out what happened. As to your machine, hard drive etc. You own it. They cannot take it, unless they replace it under warranty. In addition you own the data and they cannot keep it even if the replace the hard drive as bad the data can be extracted by a data scavenger company(you will have to pay for this as your penance for not having a backup). The repair center will know the names of companies that can open up a hard drive and read the platters, FAT etc and reconstruct the files and ship them back on a CD set. Your programs will need to be loaded on a new drive and your files will be on the CD, and not editable, but you can transfer the ones you want to your new hard drive and be back in business. Expect to pay from $250 to $2500 for the data scavenging. It is labour intensive and the cost depends on whether or not you had a control board failure(Platters and heads intact) which could be in the $250 range and with a new control board you will get the drive back with all the data. The expensive option is the head crash. They need to replace the heads in a clean room and then try the drive. If the crash did not destroy the FAT(file allocation table) it is easy to get most files. The ones that were scraped by the head are gone. If the FAT is wasted they have to replace the heads and try to recatenate the files from their headers. There are programs that help with this, but it takes a lot of trial and error. Once Apple repair realizes you have done no crooked thing I am sure they will help you. Bill