I’ve sat down to a coffee after having just spent an hour in the Apple store with one of their folks behind the Genius Bar.  

For a long time, the Finder component of MacOS X – Tiger on my iBook has been playing up.  Occasionally, it’ll randomly restart when I click on an icon, or when I’m transferring data from an optical disc of some sort.  Finder is basically the equivalent of Windows Explorer found on almost all Windows systems and needless to say, it can be considered the core of the MacOS operating system.

My Genius’ name was Doug and I’d seen him serve several customers prior to myself who’d had iPod problems.  They were all dealt with politely and efficiently and had their faulty iPod’s replaced with fresh working ones.
When it was my time to be seen, I began to explain the symptoms, the OS I was running and what not.  Right off the bat, I think he could tell I was a slightly more demanding user from computers so we skipped the usual “have you switched the power on?” kind of tech support questions.  We went through the list of fixing disk permissions, running disk utility, swapping out the RAM etc.  I’d done all of these checks many times before and went on to point out that Panther’s Finder ran perfectly in comparison.  We then ran DiskWarrior to check for any hard disk errors, where only minor problems were reported back.  We then ran an Apple technician’s set of diagnostic tools that reported no problems.  The only logical conclusion we came to was that the logic board was faulty.  Sadly, they didn’t have any in stock so they had to be ordered in for me.  I’m booked in for another visit on Wednesday so I’ll be returning to Brum very shortly.

I was very impressed with the level of service at the Genius Bar.  Whilst waiting for the various tests to complete, Doug and I chatted about the old-skool iBook’s which looked like toilet seat covers and about how everybody was sceptical about the performance of the new MacBook Pro’s.  He could have very easily served another iPod customer during this time (which would have helped the backlog) but he stayed with me throughout the entire process.  He even went and ordered 2 logic boards just for me in case the first replacement were to fail since I’d be travelling in from Aberystwyth just for this repair.  Whilst my problem was not solved today, I left feeling confident that if they had the part available, I’d have left with a repaired iBook this same afternoon.  

Keep up the good work, guys.