I DO backup, almost everyday!!!!! What i meant by the statement that you quote from me is that backups are useless if one has no computer to work on them, so if i were to send my laptop for repair then i would have a back up but nothing to work on!
And nobody at your entire university has a computer? There is no computer anywhere at the school that you could transfer your documents to, in order to keep working?
This smells very fishy to me. If it's true, then you're obviously using software that nobody else at the school supports. Perhaps you love your Mac so much that you're refusing to use the university-standard software (which may be PC or UNIX-based), which, while possibly enjoyable, leaves you wide open to your current situation - where a failure of your personal computer can destroy your ability to graduate.
Or perhaps there are other computers, and you just don't want to use them, because that would mean working from a studio instead of from home?
Have since contacted apple they are sending me a new battery and asked me to dispose of the old...
So when you first wrote that you were refusing to deal with your problem, out of fear of losing the computer, you in fact hadn't actually bothered to find out if you would end up losing it at all.
And the grand answer is that Apple is going to fix your problem without making you return it at all.
I'm sorry but there is more evidence in the last year of faulty batteries then a rash of fridge, stove, microwaves buring down people's homes.
Well, more incidents that get reported on MacRumors.
Every year, there are plenty of house fires caused by toasters, space heaters, and other electric appliances. But they don't make headline news unless the manufacturer issues a recall.
Ignore the fanbois. They are people who don't know the concept of a job critical system.
The brand/model doesn't matter. If something is actually critical, then you need to have a backup for it. This means hardware as well as software. If you don't have a standby system available, then you're going to be royally screwed when it breaks. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a multinational bank or the laptop containing your PhD thesis, the principle is the same either way.
In this case, we're talking about a Mac laptop. IBM systems also fail. So do Sun servers and industrial mainframes. Eventually, even your Thinkpad will fail.