My 12″ last-gen Powerbook was brought to the Apple Store on Monday. It was repaired on Tuesday and shipped back from Tennessee on Tuesday night. I got a call to pick it up on Wednesday afternoon.

Three days turnaround.

Now I understand why folks are die-hard Apple fans…

My only other Wow! repair experience was with my first IBM Thinkpad. IBM actually overnight-shipped me the shipping box which I then used to ship the Thinkpad back to them. And similarly to the Powerbook, I got the Thinkpad back after less than 3 days.

The repair depot not only fixed the fan problem by replacing it. They also swapped in a new battery. Yes, the battery I had was part of that Sony recall. That is what I call REAL organization.

Yep, I am a happy Powerbook owner.

Except that I will probably sell it off. I need the money.

I finally got a 12″ Powerbook. It is the model with the 1.5GHz CPU. The excuse was to compare it with my 12″ iBook to see which one would be more useful as the MBA notebook.

One of the first things I noticed while running the Powerbook with the AC adapter was the fan. The fan pitch would change depending on whether the ‘Book was flat on the table or tilted up or whether I was carrying or moving it. It was an obvious bad fan bushing/bearing symptom. Or so I thought.

Since the ‘Book is still under the original 1 year warranty, I thought that it would be an easy matter to bring it in to the local Apple Store for warranty repair.

Well, it wasn’t quite so easy.

Apple Stores have this thing called the Genius Bar which at most other stores would be called Technical Support or Service and Repair etc.

Unfortunately, you cannot just walk up, join the queue and expect to be served. No no no!

You have to first find the Concierge.

To do that, go to any Mac and click on the Concierge icon. Obviously, you need to know how to spell Concierge in the first place (it’s actually a French word )

Then once you’ve got Concierge running, you need to enter your name and contact info. Then Concierge will tell you that due to unexpected demand, you cannot be served.

Obviously, this is after you have driven all the way to the Apple Store and fought over or paid for parking.

The whole concept of the Concierge is to make an appointment with the Genius (aka Tech Support Rep) at the Genius Bar. I assume that the idea is to provide for individualized service, perhaps similar to what you would get from your personal doctor.

However, there is no clear indication of how everything works. If this is the first time you are looking for technical support at an Apple Store, you don’t know where to start.

The problem with Concierge today is that there is no way to make an appointment for the next day unless you have paid $99 per year for the Pro service program. You have to make an appointment on the day of the appointment itself. And if the appointment queue at the store is already full, too bad.

To Apple’s credit, you can make the appointment online. Again, you need to make it on the same day as the appointment, but that is still better than driving to the store.

To make an appointment, you would go to www.apple.com. At the bottom of the page, you can “See all Apple Store locations”. Select the store and look for the link for “Apple Store Concierge”. This will bring you to a page where you can fill in your name and email address. After having done that, you will be able to select a time for the appointment.

Depending on the Store’s location, there may be a lot of people, so be prepared to spend a lot of time. I would give 1 to 2 hours. So don’t expect to do a quick lunch time errand. Not quick. No no no!

The good thing is that the Genius finally admitted that my ‘Book had a fan problem. Obviously, I had to make the fan come on (not easy in an airconditioned location). Fortunately, the ‘Book is still under warranty because the list price for the repair is $310!

Anyway, we’ll see how well they repair it.

I still haven’t decided whether to keep the ‘Book.

I just spent two or so hours working on the microeconomics assignment aka homework. Ugh!

There were only three problems to answer, but they were not quite so easy or obvious.

If there is one thing I learned from this is that if you really want to do an economic boycott, make sure you have enough participation or it ain’t going to work

The other thing I realized is that the professor was not kidding when she said that we could expect to spend 6 to 10 hours per week on this subject.

I’m a speed reader but as of Sunday night, I still had not finished all the reading nor reviewed the previous day’s lesson. I’m going to fail!!!!

Being the geek that I am, going back to school inevitably brings on visions of back-to-school gadgets.

One of the things I am looking at is the requirement that all Haas MBA students have a notebook computer.

I already have an iBook (1.33GHz 12″) which is my primary non-work machine.

The question I had last week was whether this was fast enough or should I get a Powerbook (12″ 1.5GHz).

I ended up having MacService install a 100GB 7200rpm harddrive in the iBook on Friday.

The result is that the iBook is definitely faster and more responsive.

There is also no real sense of more heat generated or shorter battery life. I did notice a little more noise but that is only in a quiet room.

Another thing I played with was ATIccelerator II, a cool utility to overclock the ATI graphics chip on your Mac.

I successfully overclocked the 9550 on the iBook to 324/276.75 or 54.84%/50.92% over the stock GPU/Memory speed. Practically, this is only a pacebo though, since I don’t have any graphics-intensive games on the iBook (cross my heart!).

Having done all this, I probably won’t be using my newly upgraded iBook very much for the first two subjects that we are doing at Haas. Well, other than for the Organizational Behaviour (OB) project. The Microeconomics professor said yesterday that we didn’t really need a notebook in her class.