Mini Goes South

[Quadraman]

I'm surprised Apple is still keeping G4 mini motherboards in stock. I read about one guy who had a Quad G5 machine go south under warranty and Apple sent him a new Quad Intel machine to replace it.

 

[Christopher]

Also, is your serial number SystemSEUMB (or something similar), and if not, does it match th one printed on the case? That'd be entertaining to know. (I had to get my iMac repaired in a similar way to your Mini last year, and they replace the mobo/hdd/cd I think, and the serial number came back weird.

I had my iMac G5 iSight's mobo replaced twice under AppleCare and they just relabeled the Ethernet ID number. My serial number has comeback both ok.

 

[Patrickool93]

I'm surprised Apple is still keeping G4 mini motherboards in stock. I read about one guy who had a Quad G5 machine go south under warranty and Apple sent him a new Quad Intel machine to replace it.

He must have had more then one problem with it then. There will be parts for it for probably 3-5 years in stock.

 

[cinemafia]

When I got it back, Apple had not bothered to clear out the forced verbose boot-up, and I'd forgotten how to disable it. Luckily the local shop cleared it for me without any further charge. Apple had also installed Leopard on the new drive for me, but they must have screwed something up with the install, because after I finished the initial setup/registration process, it would just keep looping back to the beginning. The lead tech at the local shop said this is typical, as they are constantly getting stuff back from Apple where hardware has been replaced and/or software installed but there is no effort made to make sure the machine actually works as intended afterward...kind of sad on Apple's part, but perhaps it's just an unfortunate symptom of their increasing user-base.

Anyway, I ended up wiping the drive and reinstalling Leopard myself, and now she's running right as rain. And also, a correction, it turns out they did not replace the optical drive, just the mobo and hard drive. Although the optical drive was unresponsive before I handed it over, it was an effect of the IDE controller failing, not of the optical drive itself. I also got a new (to me) 18" LCD monitor for the Mini, along with the aformentioned MiniStack...I should really take some pics of the 'new' setup sooner or later.

 

[LCGuy]

Good to hear it had a happy ending eventually

 

[cinemafia]

Thanks! Leopard's running pretty smooth on it now, and I've still got 10 or so months left on AppleCare. :beige: