In the waning days of December I finally got around to replacing the light above our dining room table. It only took me a couple of months to get around to it. This required turning off the electricity and rewiring the fixture. I was careful to make sure that all computers were turned off and unplugged before I started flicking breaker switches to determine what breaker would cut off the electricity to the kitchen-dining area.
Putting up the new light fixture was easier than expected, but when I ran upstairs to plug in my wife's Mac Mini, and disaster hit. The Mini made a cheap, scratching sound, beeped 3 times, and played dead. I rebooted and got the same response--no reaction from the monitor and no soft whir from a spinning hard drive. I turned on the Windows computer and learned that the scratching sound was described as the sound of breaking glass, and that 3 beeps signified some sort of memory problem.
I didn't see how my electrical project could have deep-sized the Mini. My wife came home and told me that the Mini had failed to boot up when she had turned it on that morning. I put the computer back in its box and we headed on down to a computer store that specializes in Apple products. The service guy tried to boot up the Mini using various keyboard combinations and got the same results I had. He shook his head and told us he'd need time to diagnose the problem, and that if he couldn't figure out what was wrong, he'd send it to the Apple store in Osaka. It would all take time and possibly money. If it had to go to the Apple store, repairs would be expensive, and it might not cost that much more to buy a new, improved Mac Mini. My wife had wandered off and was looking at Macbooks. She really wanted a laptop, she told me. It would come in handy when we traveled and she could use it in different rooms in the house. She needed a computer.
It was Christmas. The Leopard release was not going to be announced at MacWorld. We drove down to Kojima Denki and priced the mid-range Macbook. The price they quoted was the same as I'd get at the online Apple store using my educational discount. And they threw in a 5-year guarantee. We took the Macbook home that night.
After waiting a couple of weeks, we called back to inquire about the Mac Mini. The service guy was out. He finally called the next day and said the Mini was fine. Dust had clogged up the interior and cooling ducts. Now the computer booted up just fine and we could pick it up any time for a repair charge of 500o yen. My wife told me I could have the Mac Mini. I asked the service guy to upgrade the memory to 1GB and looked forward to a Mac intensive 2007.
Update: My wife likes the 19 inch Samsung monitor that goes with the Mini, meaning I get my share of quality time with the Macbook. Tiger and the Intel Core 2 Duo do make a difference.
