Over the weekend (right in the middle of some vacation planning), Laurie’s iBook (Lucy) decided to act up. At first is seemed that maybe the video card had gone bad. The screen was flickering and showing funny lines. At closer inspection though, the entire computer had also frozen. The screen continued to flicker. I shut her down and rebooted … the chime sounded, but no boot-up. Eeek! So then I took out the battery, checked everything, put the battery back in and she booted up. Yeah … well not quite. I decide to run the Disk Utility just to see what it came up with … flicker, flicker, flicker … Lucy was frozen again.

At this point, I decide I’d better try to get her booted up and quickly backup everything. It took a couple tries, but I got her booted up and got our home directory backed up. Well, mostly. She started to flicker and froze just before everything was copied, but I was able to get most of our stuff. The mail and all our files made it so we are cool. After that freeze, I was no longer able to get Lucy to boot at all. The chime continued to sound, but she never actually booted up. Not in safe mode, not from the system CD. All no go.

Now the question was, "Had our Apple Care run out yet?". Luckily not. We are still good until August. So I call Apple Care, run through the issue with them and what all I tried. Then they have me try a few more things. Nothing. Still can’t boot. The farthest we got was to right before the login screen.

We were going to have to send Lucy off to Apple for repairs.

DHL came yesterday bearing the pre-paid return box and we packed her up last night. This morning they came and picked her up at my office. Apple said it should only be 4-5 days before we get her back. Be safe Lucy. We miss you.