so, shortly before going on vacation my ibook video went on the fritz again – sporadic flashyness, shimmering-waves of grey and occasionally absolute deadness – so i phoned applecare for the second time in two weeks, fought my way through the inane frontline of call management people, and had a box delivered for service.

called monday, box arrived tuesday, serviced wednesday, box returned thursday; all jolly good stuff. as-per normal i thoroughly nuked my home directory contents before shipment, using the imac at home to fill-in functionality.

when i got it back the receipt said nothing more than:

full diagnostic and test

…which worried me somewhat.

last night – having returned from vacation – i booted the panther install cd with the intention of reinstalling the operating system, and was horrified to find the video image looking like this:

i immediately leapt to the conclusion that – as the chit had implied – some monkey had run diags on it and not found the (sporadic) problem that i experienced; this would be in spite of the lengthy explanation i’d given to the person on the phone.

however: being of a suspicious nature i fed some keywords into google and by great fortune stumbled across the following explanation [www.mymac.com] which fitted the circumstances perfectly.

this is – in fact – the only proof i have that my logic board was replaced by applecare, and i am glad that it was done, but it does mean that my panther bootdisks are if not useless then at least annoying to use.

having now experienced both the video problem [www.appleinsider.com] twice, and the power supply cable problem [www.macnn.com] once, i must admit to being really disappointed with apple hardware quality nowadays, as well as infuriated by what they’ve done to the applecare call centres – evidently there is an acoustic coupler in there somewhere, or perhaps a couple of soup cans and some wet string that provides the link to india such that you can barely hear the person on the other end of the line, for the crackling on the line.

i intend to raise the matter with apple, but i want to vent a bit first. hence this posting.