Real time will stay aligned to blog time for a while as I let you know what happened today, Monday 7 February 2011.
You will remember from my last entry that my laptop, whose hard drive bears all my notes and most of my pictures for this blog, began behaving oddly a few days ago. In the hope of a remedy for its ills I took the machine to the Apple Store in Kingston today for an appointment with an Apple "genius", the company's title for an employee designated to answer all manner of technical questions.
The Kingston store must be one of the smallest in Apple's growing empire, contrasting with the Covent Garden store, which I visited a few weeks ago and which is the largest in Europe, all cavernous expanses of high-tech-trendy exposed brickwork, glass staircases and truckloads of beautiful machines to try out. Kingston's little Apple by contrast is a single-fronted unit in a shopping mall but nevertheless manages to accommodate a good quantity of enticing hardware, software and accessories, as well as a fair number of staff, all wearing the appointed blue long-sleeved teeshirts bearing the white Apple logo. Some of them wore hats, but there were no geeky beanies in evidence. The genii were clustered behind the Genius Bar at the rear of the store, where I made myself known to a young woman who kept the list of appointments on an iPad and who duly registered my arrival. She later suggested that I take a seat as the genii were working through a busy schedule and consequently running slightly late.
The appointed genius did not keep me waiting too long however and I was duly ushered before him. Diagnosis was swift and certain after he had run a test programme stored on the external hard drive that he had swiftly connected to my machine. The problem was indeed the graphics chip housed on the motherboard, an item produced not by Apple but by a company called (without apparent irony) Nvidia, the fault being a known issue and the subject of some discussion between the two companies. I would of course have been delighted to have been offered a brand new and consequently faster machine (like the couple talking to the next genius along) but my bespectacled genius was able to offer a completely free repair, the only tiny wriggling fly mired in the sticky ointment being that the back-room repairing genii had such a large workload currently that it could be as many as ten days before I would be reunited with my computer, although this would be "unlikely".
The due paperwork having been printed and signed I left and returned to my car, my case now lighter than when I had arrived.
The genius had not been wearing a hat but sported the most a la mode spectacles imaginable, with black lettering taking up the whole depth of the creamy white side arms, a bold statement crediting Georgio as the design house responsible.
STOP PRESS: As I typed that last sentence on my phone, the same phone took a call from the Apple Store telling me that my machine was, beyond wildest expectations of me and genius alike, now repaired and ready for collection. Normal blogging should therefore be resumed sooner rather than later. Not a groundhog day, then.
You will remember from my last entry that my laptop, whose hard drive bears all my notes and most of my pictures for this blog, began behaving oddly a few days ago. In the hope of a remedy for its ills I took the machine to the Apple Store in Kingston today for an appointment with an Apple "genius", the company's title for an employee designated to answer all manner of technical questions.
The Kingston store must be one of the smallest in Apple's growing empire, contrasting with the Covent Garden store, which I visited a few weeks ago and which is the largest in Europe, all cavernous expanses of high-tech-trendy exposed brickwork, glass staircases and truckloads of beautiful machines to try out. Kingston's little Apple by contrast is a single-fronted unit in a shopping mall but nevertheless manages to accommodate a good quantity of enticing hardware, software and accessories, as well as a fair number of staff, all wearing the appointed blue long-sleeved teeshirts bearing the white Apple logo. Some of them wore hats, but there were no geeky beanies in evidence. The genii were clustered behind the Genius Bar at the rear of the store, where I made myself known to a young woman who kept the list of appointments on an iPad and who duly registered my arrival. She later suggested that I take a seat as the genii were working through a busy schedule and consequently running slightly late.
The appointed genius did not keep me waiting too long however and I was duly ushered before him. Diagnosis was swift and certain after he had run a test programme stored on the external hard drive that he had swiftly connected to my machine. The problem was indeed the graphics chip housed on the motherboard, an item produced not by Apple but by a company called (without apparent irony) Nvidia, the fault being a known issue and the subject of some discussion between the two companies. I would of course have been delighted to have been offered a brand new and consequently faster machine (like the couple talking to the next genius along) but my bespectacled genius was able to offer a completely free repair, the only tiny wriggling fly mired in the sticky ointment being that the back-room repairing genii had such a large workload currently that it could be as many as ten days before I would be reunited with my computer, although this would be "unlikely".
The due paperwork having been printed and signed I left and returned to my car, my case now lighter than when I had arrived.
The genius had not been wearing a hat but sported the most a la mode spectacles imaginable, with black lettering taking up the whole depth of the creamy white side arms, a bold statement crediting Georgio as the design house responsible.
STOP PRESS: As I typed that last sentence on my phone, the same phone took a call from the Apple Store telling me that my machine was, beyond wildest expectations of me and genius alike, now repaired and ready for collection. Normal blogging should therefore be resumed sooner rather than later. Not a groundhog day, then.
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