My trip wasn't the only reason for my silence. It turns out, that on my PowerBook's 15th day, I found it only had half the memory it should. I'm fairly certain it happened while I was installing Microsoft Office, as it was the only time the machine froze and I had to find how to force it to reboot. It was easy to take it to the local Apple Store's Genius Bar; I could sign up online at home and when I got there 20 minutes later, my name was about to be called. He swapped the two mem cards and quickly determined that it wasn't the cards that were bad but one of the slots. This was annoying because the computer needed to be fixed, I couldn't just swap a memory card. Now if it were a stock PowerBook they might have switched it for me right there, but I had ordered it online and got a larger hard drive and a more powerful graphics card. So I had to deal with the online store. The Genius Bar guy opened a support incident for me and said I'd hear more.
Unfortunately I didn't. I checked the incident status online and it was closed the next day. So I called and got a very nice person who tracked it down, reopened it, and connected me with someone who could help me. I then found out the procedure was, they would send me some return slip to print out and put on the outside of the box for me to ship the machine back to them, as soon as my return was registered in the shipping system (ie as soon as I sent it) they would overnight a replacement. This bothered me for a few reasons. One I didn't have a printer. Two I was going away soon and wanted the machine for the trip. Three how would I get all my data (2 weeks of setup and conversion from windows) to the new machine. It was particularly annoying that I had read about how wonderfully you could clone one mac from another, but I wouldn't have the two machines together to do so. Nor could I just keep my hard drive. I also couldn't drop it off at the Apple Store and have the new machine shipped there so I could clone in the store. One good thing, I could wait up to 14 days to use the shipping form, so I could take the old machine (with 512MB) with me. I'd deal with this after my trip.
I copied everything in my home directory on the mac, this includes all the stuff would be in the window's registry (as well as almost 30GB of iTunes files). I went to the apple store and printed the return slip. I then when to FedEx Kinko's (did I know FedEx bought Kinko's?) to ship it. The woman there wasn't particularly clueful, though she was friendly. After about an hour they figured out how to enter the printed out slip in their system (I printed it using FedEx's website!). She also didn't charge me for packing it so I guess it was ok. The machine was off, my new one should be shipped overnight tomorrow.
Well that's what apple's site said the first day. The second day it said it would arrive in over a week. I called and got through quickly but they were unhelpful with my frustration. They said it might arrive sooner, it was only an estimate, as if that helped. Well the next day the apple site said it shipped, and when I checked the tracking status it left Shanghi China on Tue and was due to arrive Monday. Amazingly it arrived Fri morning, so it really wasn't bad.
Now for one of the reasons I'm liking Mac OS X much more than windows. I got the machine and started it up, after going through some registration screens I had it up and running. I had the network up and running but had some problems connecting to my windows machine (the format wasn't "\\machine\share" like on Windows but more URL-like: "smb://machine/share" and I had forgotten this incantation. I copied over directory by directory and installed iWork, MS Office, Emacs and Firefox. All my preferences and data made it over fine. It all took about three hours, one of which was purely to move 30GB if iTunes files. My previous experience setting up new windows machines, even with detailed notes from the last time I had done it, was that this same amount of work took 2-3 days.
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