"You just don't think it can happen to you..."

[jay72488]

Yesterday, I was the brand new owner of an Intel 17in. iMac. I bought it refurbished, and luckily recieved a hard drive upgrade.

Unfortunately, that hard drive was faulty upon arrival and S.M.A.R.T. deemed it a fatal error. So 1hr. later on phone support and a wasted trip to an apple store has me sending back the computer tommorow morning.

I do support Apple. And I'll try to be conscious that "it" happen... It's just hard to believe that it happened to me...

[Susurrus]

It's not really the end of the world. Of course it's nice to get a new computer, but you'll make it through this. Consider us your support group.

Anyways, sorry to hear about that. I've been lucky and haven't had a SMART error at all yet, let alone in a new computer. Hopefully they'll accidently upgrade your hard drive to a RAID0 SATAII Raptor array or some such.

Well, one can always hope...
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Computer Engineer
Junior, Brown University
15" NC8430 HP Laptop
1.42Ghz PPC Mac Mini, 1Gb RAM, 1st Gen
40GB G4 iPod
2GB Black iPod Nano

[wahoo mini]

I have had a new Mini Duo for about two months now, and one RAM module was bad. Of course, intermittent bad, so it's impossible to replicate the failure reliably. But after misdiagnosing it as software troubles, back to the store it went.

But, like you and the HD, they did fix it, keeping it a week to leave it on 24 hrs/day and test it. They were nice about it and so far so good.

New or refurb, stuff craps out sometimes. Hopefully we didn't get lemons.

[Cory Cooper]

Sorry to hear that jay72488.

I have always found it best when I buy a new Mac to leave it on at least a week 24/7 (as wahoo mini eluded to) for that exact reason. It's kind of an end-user burn-in period of sorts...to ensure everything is working correctly.

Of course, I tend to leave my Macs on 24/7 anyway...I have 5 that have been on (with small exception) since the day I fired them up the first time.

Yes, electronics do go bad and are shipped bad...just part of the game. I have had a few bumps myself, but I do have to say that Apple really does have a pretty good track record as far as quality/reliability. Ansd remember, Apple doesn't manufacture the drives.
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MBP 2.4 C2D; 4GB
mini 1.66 CD; 2GB
mini 1.25 G4; 1GB
VT N0362 2x2 G5; 4GB
Xserve (SL) 2x1.33 G4; 2GB
QS 2002 2x1 G4; 1.5GB
128K 8 68000
8 other Macs and an Apple //e