My iBook is iFlakey

So, I bring the iBook into the Apple store and thell them what I want to do. They tell me that they don't have the power to just swap out machines under any circumstances and that I have to call Apple Care's 800 number to get them to "okay" it first. Which, if I had known I had to do this, I would have done before I came into the Apple store at 7pm on a Friday night. See, Apple Care closes at 6pm.

So, I mention to the guy that this is the third time I've had a problem with this iBook and without missing a beat he asks me if this is the third time for the SAME problem. I tell him essentially that it's not the same specific problem, but the general problem of my iBook not functioning properly is the same. He reminds me that he is unable to replace machines without an "okay" from Apple Care. I tell him that it seems a little hobbling for the Apple corporation to not give the so-called "geniuses" at the Apple store's "Genius Bars" the ability to do whatever needs to be done to make the customer happy. He said he did agree that it can be frustrating.

The guy was nice, I'll give him that.

Then he asked me if I had maxed the RAM out. I told him I had and that unless it was an Apple-brand RAM, it could be that. But the non-Apple-brand-RAM that I have in there has been operating flawlessly since I installed it back in November, or so.

"Some times it takes a while to go bad," he tells me. Yeah, right. But just to be safe, he pulls out the RAM and I go back to using it. Of course, it seems fine. But I can't sit there all night waiting for it to go bad. After all, it took over night for the iBook to stop letting me write to the hard drive the night before. So, I took my iBook home and started reinstalling everything. Not surprisingly everything was running more slowly, but definitely more slowly than it had when I got the thing. Frustratingly, last night gave me no errors regarding saving to the hard drive.

Today when I woke up, I continued to install stuff. These installs are all nothing major - just the basic security and system updates that Apple wants you to update. So, I do all of those things. Along the way, I get system hangs. Suddenly I get the dumb little spinning beach ball which replaces the old-style hour-glass. I can't get the dock (Mac's version of the task bar) to pop up and I can't swap between apps. When the RAM does free up enough to switch apps, I get to the simple text editor I've been using as the "can I save to the hard drive" litmus test and hit command-S, the keyboard shortcut for the save function. It saves fine, no error message.

So, I decide, I'll just have to deal with the slowness for now and begin tweaking various preference settings for various apps I use a lot. I pull up iChat (OSX's AIM) and start telling it what noises to make for events. Suddenly, I get the beach ball and can't get to any other apps again. Then, the machine begins to restart. Only, it doesn't actually restart - everything just stops working and I get this little animation that I only see at startup and shut down. After a few minutes of waiting for the restart to finish, or continue even, I give up and hold the power button down. That shuts the machine down entirely. I hit the button again and start all over.

So, basically what I have, at this point, is a PC. Sure, it may look like an Apple iBook, but it performs like a PC. In fact, it performs like a Windows 98 PC. My XP desktop machine crashes and hangs, but is nowhere near as random as this iBook is right now. I'm nervous to do any serious work on it because I'm afraid in the middle of it, it could crash or hang or whatever.

The short of it is, I can't call up Apple Care with these kinds of problems. They're inconsistent and can't be duplicated. As I learned the last time I called them, they had no sympathy for me having been an ex-PC guy, nor did they have any sympathy for me having lost three weeks of productivity to their crappily designed iBook.

At this point, I don't really know what to do...