Today marks the one month anniversary of buying my iMac, and I had to return it to the store today because the hard drive needs to be replaced. I am so impressed - badly! It didn't take them long to figure out what was wrong, but that doesn't make me any happier. They didn't have the standard iMac hard drive in stock, so I had to leave it there - with all of my private data on there, I'm not happy about that.

As I was leaving, no less than 3 employees stopped me on the way out to make sure I was pleased. Well let's see:

• My 1-month old, over $2,000 iMac is dead already because this store sold me a bad computer in the first place
• I had to drive an hour to the store, another hour home, and I'll drive two more hours to pick it up in a few days. That's ok, I surely had nothing better to do with my time, like run my business and work for my clients.
• I will have lost a total of 3 productivity days where I can't get my job done because they couldn't fix it on site.

Do you really think I'm happy? 

When talking to my "genius," he tells me that I should have called Apple Care because they could have told me where a closer Authorized Apple Repair Center is. I DID call Apple Care, and they told me to come to this store! 

While there, I inquire about Time Machine. You can't set the backup interval on it, it's either on and performs backups every hour, or it's off, but I can exclude certain files. I have a 10 GB mail file using Thunderbird. Thunderbird is far superior to their Mail program - I'll blog about that another day. In the meantime, I can't allow Time Machine to backup my 10 GB file every hour - my computer will be filled up in a week, but I want some type of backup for my email.

Hence, a new inquiry about a second external hard drive with backup software that will allow me to manually determine files and time intervals for backups. Well sure, they have them, but my "genius" strongly recommends I don't bother with them and stick with Time Machine, and switch to Apple's Mail program instead of Thunderbird. Well, there goes a couple hundred dollar sale for him, I'll take my business elsewhere.

So my final experience from this morning? Chatting with another woman who was bringing her iMac in to get it fixed. She had a handy little cart for moving it, and she suggested I buy one, only $20 at Costco. Why, you ask? Because, in her words, "It makes it so much easier when you have to keep bringing your iMac back here." Oh joy, I get to look forward to more returns?