From the first morning I put my new "certified reconditioned" MacBook into use I was having problems. iMovie was crashing. A lot. I thought I might have isolated the problem to rendering titles over .AVI clips imported from my wife's digital camera. Maybe that Casio .AVI importer extension was bad, even though their website claimed stable compatibilty with Intel Macs, I thought. But then things got worse over the weekend.

Spinning beach balls started popping up everywhere. Safari pages took longer and longer to load. Things in general were slowing down. I had already run Software Update to make sure I had the latest releases of the OS and other apps. So I started to get worried.

Then this past Monday morning everything seemed right for about 40 minutes. iMovie was humming along (granted I was avoiding said Casio .AVI clips). And then everything blew up.

The entire system slowed to a crawl. Single clicks in the Finder took upwards of 30 seconds to register. Something was seriously amiss and my bet was on hard drive failure.

What really sucks about this is that I had used the MacBook for work last Friday, and so now had some important files that I needed to retrieve off of its slow, dying hard drive. Took. For. Ever.

Once I managed to pull everything off of the drive, I tried reformatting it and reisntalling from the install discs that came with the machine. Got about halfway through the process and the screen froze on a dialogue box telling me that the install could not be completed. Boom goes the dynamite.

I signed up for the earliest available Genius Bar appointment I could make at the Walnut Creek, CA Apple Store - 5:40 pm on Wednesday - and packed the MacBook back into its box. When the Geniuses (Genii?) tried to reinstall OS X from their firewire boot drive, Disk Utilities registered my new computer's hard drive as "Failed" in big red letters. Totally dead.

The Geniuses were nice about it, and told me that if they had a matching drive in stock they could do a quick swap right there and send me home with a "good as new" machine. No such luck. I should have my MacBook back in 4-6 more business days ("Hopefully a lot less," said one Genius, "but that's the official estimate"), but I'll have to make another trip out to Walnut Creek to get it.

I don't mean to sound whiney: Walnut Creek isn't that far from my home, and I'd rather go pick it up than waste a day waiting for FedEx to deliver the (hopefully) fixed machine to me. So it's not that big of a deal. And those guys at the Genius Bar get an A-plus for customer service (pending my getting my computer back in working condition next week). But, you know, you drop a grand or so on a new computer and you expect it to work.

The Geniuses encouraged me to call the Apple Store to let them know they'd shipped me a bum machine. I told them I'd love to let them know but didn't really want to spend any more time on the matter than I already had. We compromised on the idea of my writing this article - maybe someone from Apple will glimpse it, and at least I get paid for my time. And with any luck a week from now this will all be a distant memory and I'll happily be computing at the speed of Dual Core.