Oh indeed it’s going mental around here with overuse of the word, ‘New’.

A couple of weeks ago my nearly-four-year-old laptop went completely black when I dragged an image to be edited. Panic! High blood pressure! Gnashing of teeth! Somehow it decided to restart after half a day, and I of course began my usual assault on the internet to find out wtf was that wtf.

“macbookpro4,1 black screen” gave some pretty definitive answers, and as soon as I checked I had the dreaded NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT graphics card, I was pretty sure I was staring “ugly immediate future” in the mouth.

One large Mac shop nearby Technische Universität was distinctly unhelpful (unlike last year when my top case gave out), and said my laptop wasn’t covered as I had a blaaaahblllaaaa … (won’t dwell on the minutia). So I resorted to running the fan on high which seemed to be the only solution for temporarily deferring inevitable logic board death while I a) tried to get through a stack of work and b) alternately pondered what to do or whined.

Being not one who likes to lose an argument when the price of doing so is about half that of a new laptop, I searched for precedents. Excitement, yes. Found them and called Apple just as my screen gave out again and on the very last day of the four-year period Apple would cover replacement for free, and received a definitive, “Yes, my supervisor says you’re covered.”

All of which found me on Tuesday in BetterWorx, really hoping that previous definitive wouldn’t be graced by a conditional. And I’ve seldom been so happy to see my laptop fall apart when tested as I was when they ran the graphics test and it threw back the NVIDIA failure.

More agonising as I was informed I might not make the deadline and …

Friday arrived and so did my laptop, ahead of the deadline by a scant 8 hours. And!

New 500gb hard drive installed (been sitting on my shelf since before the floods in Thailand doubled the price). Wonky latch also fixed!

I spent last night doing a completely fresh install (ten hours of trawling through all my forgotten system tweaks that suddenly and glaringly weren’t there), and now hoping nothing more goes askew (could do with a new battery some time), and I get at least the rest of the year out of this poor, clobbered thing (pulled an enormous dustball out from under the command key when I noticed the backlight was a little askew).

(This is a thank you also to everyone at BetterWorx.)