I helped a friend buy a refurbished 12" G4 PB from Apple a little while ago, and it turns out there's something funky going on with the CD drive. I wanted to both confirm with any other owners that what I'm seeing is abnormal, and to ask if people have any suggestions for making things go as smoothly as possible with Apple's phone folks.
The drive periodically makes a really awful, very loud screeching noise when reading (or trying to burn) discs. It's not consistant, and it's far more frightening than any noise I've ever heard come out of a laptop drive before, so I'm assuming it's not supposed to be doing that. It does work, though, and Apple's Hardware Test CD didn't report any problems.
Burning discs, however, doesn't work; the first try produced a funny-looking coaster, and the second disc could only be read by that powerbook--my G5 and an in-store PC both said the disc was unreadable. This sounds like other bad optical drive issues I've read about before.
As for the repair, the timing is really bad, since her 90 day free Applecare just expired last week (she's a poor college student, so skipped paying for Applecare). Since the hardware warranty is still good, the repair should be covered, but I'm wondering if there's any easy way to get through to somebody without having them charge you for phone support to find out that there's a hardware problem.
I'm sure some people here who've wandered the Applecare phone tree before. Suggestions?
(Really a bummer for her, since apparently it's been doing it since she bought it, but I only heard it right before Christmas when I helped her burn a CD for the first time; she didn't realize it wasn't supposed to do that. Worse, I'm leaving the country for three weeks on Tuesday, and not only is she a novice computer user, but her English is shaky enough that she's definitely not going to be comfortable dealing with Apple folks on the phone. I'm calling for her to try and smooth things out, but I'll just have monday to take a shot at it. What we have here is a case of terminally bad timing.)
The drive periodically makes a really awful, very loud screeching noise when reading (or trying to burn) discs. It's not consistant, and it's far more frightening than any noise I've ever heard come out of a laptop drive before, so I'm assuming it's not supposed to be doing that. It does work, though, and Apple's Hardware Test CD didn't report any problems.
Burning discs, however, doesn't work; the first try produced a funny-looking coaster, and the second disc could only be read by that powerbook--my G5 and an in-store PC both said the disc was unreadable. This sounds like other bad optical drive issues I've read about before.
As for the repair, the timing is really bad, since her 90 day free Applecare just expired last week (she's a poor college student, so skipped paying for Applecare). Since the hardware warranty is still good, the repair should be covered, but I'm wondering if there's any easy way to get through to somebody without having them charge you for phone support to find out that there's a hardware problem.
I'm sure some people here who've wandered the Applecare phone tree before. Suggestions?
(Really a bummer for her, since apparently it's been doing it since she bought it, but I only heard it right before Christmas when I helped her burn a CD for the first time; she didn't realize it wasn't supposed to do that. Worse, I'm leaving the country for three weeks on Tuesday, and not only is she a novice computer user, but her English is shaky enough that she's definitely not going to be comfortable dealing with Apple folks on the phone. I'm calling for her to try and smooth things out, but I'll just have monday to take a shot at it. What we have here is a case of terminally bad timing.)