I’ve only had a chance to skim this, but it looks like potentially interesting reading later: “AppleCared: My Life Inside Apple and AppleCare,” a sort of “behind the scenes” look at the fast-paced and exciting world of tech support.
By the way, I’ve been pretty pleased with my now repaired iBook. I can even use it without it being plugged in– amazing! To me, it also looks like they did something to the screen because it doesn’t have any key impressions anymore and it seems a lot, well, cleaner. I don’t know if they would have actually replaced that though.
I also went ahead and wiped and then rebuilt my harddrive. The only thing I lost from all of that was my address book (oops, forgot), but that wasn’t all that important.
And on the plus-side, it just seems like everything is running better to me. Years ago, a computer geek/tech support person told me that it was a good idea as a matter of “spring cleaning” to wipe and rebuild computer hard drives about once a year or so. When I asked why, what difference would it make, he said something like this: “Computers are kind of like toasters in that, the way that bread leaves crumbs, software leave little bits of fragmented code all over the place. When the crumbs/code builds up, it can be a problem. With a toaster, what you do is every once in a while turn the thing over and give it a good shake over a garbage can. With a computer, you erase and rebuild the hard drive.”