To follow up on my previous posts (two) on my macbook doing its very best to plummet into a swan dive and splatter itself across the pavement.I called up Apple Support who were all-round pretty unhelpful. After I described the issue, including the conclusion that I had arrived on and directing them to the documentation that I had found they essentially told me what I had resolved to do prior to calling which was visit a Apple Repair Center. So off I went, dropped the computer off and 3 days late my macbook was returned to me fully functional, although covered with grubby fingerprints which the service repair officer clearly felt did not require cleaning up.
Nonetheless the repair was free-of-charge due to an agreement between Apple and NVIDIA regarding the graphics card in this particular model of MBP. I was given an invoice for my records and I must say; had the nvidia agreement not covered the cost(s) of the repair I would have simply invested in a new laptop rather than suffer the repair costs.
Without going into specifics; the repair would have cost me a little over $2000, the macbook having only cost me $2449. No wonder nvidia decided to cover the repair costs - noone would bother repairing their computer at this cost and would no doubt seriously consider heading away from the Macbook Pro towards a computer with an alternative brand of graphics card. Personally I am a fan of NVIDIA, I have always found their performance superior to others like ATI. It was lucky that I pursued this straight-away as I now (as of Friday) have a 'full-time' job which requires that I have a personal laptop that I may work from.
So folks, a word of caution to those of you running a Macbook Pro manufactured between May 2007 and September 2008 with a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor - if you do have an issue with the graphics performance, it is covered under this agreement for 4 years from the purchase date.
