lemontastic macbook woes

My poor little macbook is once again in the throws of hard drive failure. I returned from lunch and attempted to unlock the screensaver, to find that bringing up the login dialog took ~2 minutes. The only large processes running at the time were firefox and azureus on a machine with 2gb of ram. When I was finally able to login, I noticed an error message from azureus regarding failed writes. At that point, I craned my head towards where the hard drive was located. That tell-tale click-grind-whir noise was repeating softly above the fan noise. I figure, I have maybe a day before this thing kraps itself. Time to make a backup and start calling Apple. Unfortunately this always seems to happen when I am about to travel somewhere. I love this little laptop more than my old pb 12", which was a great little machine. Hopefully apple will just replace it at this point, since I’ve had it less than one year and have had the hd logic board and fan fail before this.

I’ve spoke with apple yesterday, and the tech was adamant about me running DiskUtility’s verify. I didn’t want to do that before attempting to backup the latest changes to the machine. I do have a backup from 3 weeks ago, but it’s missing a vm that I would like to have. So I left the machine attempting to copy that vm and a few other files overnight. When I woke up ~6hrs later, it was still "working", but the UI was not responsive. So I turned if off and on again (The IT Crowd…). The wonderful missing OS screen was what I got in return.

I contacted apple this morning and was told that since the part hadn’t failed 3 times, I couldn’t just get a laptop replacement. This means that to date I have had 16 days of downtime with this laptop due to hardware issues. Let’s assume that it will take 5 days to get me the new part. I think that’s a fair assumption since it’s Thursday. That will mean 21 days with out the laptop, in less than one year. Let’s figure out what the availability of the laptop is. Google tells me that 1 month = 30.4368499 days. Ok, so I’ve had it since January, so that’s 9 months or 273 days. So it seems like I have been with out the laptop 7.69% of the time since I got it. Great, so conversely it’s been functional 92.31% of the time. This only ever happens before I travel, it’s like the macbook is protesting.