NVidia Fail = Apple FTW?!
As the semester was coming to an end, my Macbook Pro fell victim to the Nvidia failure that is common among this generation. I immediately took it to an Apple Certified Repair Center in Binghamton, and was pretty bummed when it wouldn’t fail the test properly to be covered under Apple’s Extended Warranty program. I brought it back to my house and continued to mess with it, but was convinced that I would need to replace it with a new MBP over this break. Upon returning to Rockland, I immediately took the computer into the local Apple Store, where they reran the test. Much to my surprise, it failed the test properly, and Apple agreed to replace my logic board (even after I informed them of the custom modifications I have made to the computer) and that it would take 3-5 business days to complete. I thanked the sales rep helping me, and returned home, figuring I would get the computer back the beginning of the following week.
About 2 hours after dropping it off, I received a call from the Apple Store saying that the repair was complete, but that because of my modifications, they were unable to boot from my SSD (apparently this generation of Macbook Pro shouldn’t be able to use an SSD, according to the tech). I hopped in the car and headed back to the mall to pick it up, all while formulating a plan on how to recover my data. Once I got to the store, the sales rep (different from the original rep) tried to have me sign a release before even proving that the computer was fixed – this didn’t go over to well with me, and after a little back and forth, a different Genius Bar Rep came out to help me. I happened to have graduated high school with the rep now helping me, so we talked for a little and he told me that all of the techs/reps were shocked to see the setup that I had going on – the SSD and HDD combo. I was surprised that they hadn’t seen such a setup before, given that Lifehacker has an article on it and it just seems to be more common lately. Anyway, the rep booted off of an external, and I was greeted once again with video.
Once I had the computer back home, I restored a Snow Leopard Install DVD to an external hard drive and booted the system off that (that whole process is the one reason I’m upset that I took out my optical drive – it took me 3 tries to get the DVD restored properly, and the MBP to boot off of it). After getting the computer to boot off of the external, I was able to use the Time Machine backup from the internal HDD and restore my MBP to the exact point where it crashed. Once this was complete (~30 minutes), I was finally back to my desktop. The only change that I had to make was fixing some issues with Time Machine.
Overall, the computer is running great. Additionally, the way Apple handled the entire ordeal was excellent. Given that my MBP is over 3 years old with modifications that are known to void a warranty, Apple very easily could have done nothing. The fact that they fixed the problem for free really goes to show how much they stand behind their products.