I've used a MacBook Pro for several years now and it has proven to be a
reliable machine.
1) I agree that she should have an external drive to act as a Time Machine
backup solution. It does not need to be a drive from Apple. I do recommend
that this be as large as possible, as this will give the greatest time period
for the backups. Once the drive has filled up, it will delete the oldest
backup files to make space for the most recent ones. It does this
transparently to the user. The low price of large external drives these days
is to our advantage (2 Tb external hard drives are generally in the range of
$90-150 these days).
I found in my own experience that I most often needed to restore files when I
first had my MacBook, not due to computer problems but due to "operator error"
:-) The entire contents of the computer can be restored from the Time Machine
backup if worse comes to worse.
Make sure that she turns on the Time Machine feature!
2) The Apple warranty is 12 months for hardware, and you can extend the
Applecare to 36 months at any time during that initial 12 months. This does
not need to be purchased directly from Apple. There are any number of Mac
dealers as retail stores and online vendors (such as through Amazon) who sell
these Applecare extensions. I have ended up using my machine as my primary
computer and the investment in Applecare has been very useful. I happen to
have an advantage as I am near an Apple retail store, so I can just walk my
machine in if there is a problem. The hardware problems I have encountered
have not been "fatal" ones but ones that needed correcting before things got
worse (such as one of the two internal fans failing, etc.) While I'm normally
reluctant to recommend extended warranties, when the computer is a primary one
and a laptop, I would recommend it when the manufacturer offers it, as in this
case.
On Sunday, May29, 2011, at 4:16 AM, olympus-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Re: [OM] Apple MacBook
Michael Hobart
mhobart@xxxxxxx
The Generations Tips pages and some of my personal genealogy is available at
http://users.sisna.com/mhobart
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