When You Care Enough to Warranty the Very Best

I love my iMac, I do. The monitor (24″) is the best one out of any computer in my circle of acquaintances and bright enough that even a full day of grinding PhD computer work doesn’t leave me with a headache, and the machine is compact enough to easily move around with only a few adjusted wires.

But the bad thing about a computer being so lovable is that it integrates itself into your life just a little too fully. When I started getting occasional weird horizontal lines going across windows (that vanished when I changed the window size), I mostly ignored it. Then I got odd gradient boxes appearing in random places. Bits of windows would stretch out like they’d been put through the “distort” command in Photoshop. It was, in short, unpleasant.

After trying the fantastic SMC Fan Control software and getting a little help, but not a full solution, I just sucked it up and took it for a while. I finally started doing real research into the problem and discovered that my particular video card came from a truly horrible and irresponsible Nvidia batch that was causing trouble across pretty much every computer manufacturer out there. Well, that certainly sounded like a likely cause.

Sure enough, the techies at my local Apple Authorized Service Center put the machine through its tests and discovered: yep, it’s that crappy card. Service was free, replacements are free, only thing I’m paying for is the gas money to take my easily-transportable machine into the shop. I even got to take it back home in the meantime while they wait for the shipment.

What I’m kicking myself over: this would have been just as free and just as quick months and months ago, but I’d rather have kept my computer (and all its dreadfully useful software) around and just cross my fingers that it would somehow resolve itself. This is not a solution.

Love your AppleCare, and take full advantage of it.