Bummed ( Part II )

After talking with someone in India for about 25 minutes, it was decided that I should take my computer to the Genius Bar at the Palo Alto Apple store for warranty service.  It turns out that I had already done all of the diagnostics and had already attempted all of the repairs that they recommend over the phone.  Makes sense.  Next time I'll just start at the Genius Bar.

The guy at the Palo Alto store was really good.  He listened well, he knew his stuff, and he found another problem with the machine that I hadn't noticed ... the FireWire ports weren't working!

Ding!

That makes sense.  The FireWire controller is an integral part of the main logic board.  Several of the panics that I saw were during disk activity that could have been accessing the FireWire controller.  This could be the cause, or it may just be another symptom, but either way, Apple is replacing the main logic board under warranty.

I feel pretty good about this outcome.  I'm not sure that we've pinpointed the cause of my trouble, but I'm really happy to have the main logic board replaced for free.  There's a really good chance that this will fix the problem.

It's lucky that the FireWire ports weren't working.  That provided a solid reason to replace the main logic board and made it easy to get the machine in for warranty repairs.

The only catch ... is that I really don't know how long it will be before I get the machine back.  The repair estimate said Oct 5.  That seems kinda ridiculous.  Hopefully, they can get the part and do the repair this week.

Either way, things are looking up.  This story may have a happy ending after all.  If I'm really lucky they will replace the main logic board that I had with the other one -- the one with 8 RAM slots instead of 4 -- which would be great.

-- to be continued --