Congratulations! I’m envious. My PowerBook is over 2 years old now and while more memory makes things much nicer, I drool thinking of DualCore hotness.
I’m trying to get my sister in law to get a Mac next. She just wants the thing to work and doesn’t want to fiddle with it. Her husband knows the bare minimum about computers, but has been doing everything right: running AV software, firewall, etc. Even so, they’ve had some problems with Windows XP, including slowdowns to the point where it takes, literally, 2 minutes for it to respond to a mouse click. It’s basically unusable. They asked me for help and I’m probably going to have to back up their stuff, do a wipe and restore of XP to get it working again. I’ve done a bit of research and that seems to be the only foolproof way to fix that particular problem. I’m going to make an Ubuntu boot disk just to check and make sure that it’s not a hardware problem first though.
A combination of Boot Camp (for feeding feelings of security) form factor, and my praise for my PowerBook got one of my buddies to get an iMac. He’s liking life right now. Bastard. He just got an Xbox 360 too. Double bastard.
He hadn’t used Macs for years, since OS 7 days, and he’d had a problem with a bad motherboard in the one he did have, so he was a little leery. When he asked whether or not his old monitor would be usable I said, “Let’s see,” saw that it had a standard DVI connector, put my PowerBook to sleep, plugged the monitor in, opened my computer and, viola! The monitor was hooked up. That impressed the hell out of him, even though it was a simple little thing. Maybe that’s because his old computer had been nothing but headaches for the last year or so.
My new toy, possibly with my '06 IRS refund (more likely with my ‘07 refund) will be one of the dual system machines - I love my iMac, but there are things IE does on Windows that Safari does not do (like do a better job of editing my chorus’ website which I maintain) - Plus there are some cool games only available for Windows, not OSX. <sigh> Meanwhile, my 1.25 GHz G4 running 10.3.9 sujits me just fine.
I got AppleCare with my iBook. When my motherboard went out, replaced quickly. Just took it to a local Apple dealer and they took care of the rest. When my hard drive pooped out, I was at school. Called Apple, very helpful gentleman and I troubleshot for a bit, then I was sent a box within 24 hours, nicely padded for my prticular model, with overnight shipping paid. Fixed up for free, sent back quickly. Parts go bad, no matter what machine. Been working like a dream since. Only thing wrong is my battery is sort of shot. But I don’t usually want to bring it anywhere where it can’t be plugged in - if I bring it to class I don’t pay attention so it stays at home. I need to figure out if that’s covered under AppleCare or not.
Ours came very fast- we ordered it at an Apple store but we upgraded the RAM and a few other bits, so it had to be ordered in. We ordered before lunch on a Monday 12/18 and received it Wednesday by lunch time.
Excellent service! I bet yours comes soon- let me know how you like it, I will need to replace my Gateway notebook soon…