First, some history. Since the release of Mac OS X, I've been wanting to get in to Macs and kinda get under the hood of the OS and see what's going on in there. I'm a Linux/Unix guy and Mac OS X being based off a flavor of Unix, I'm way curious. But I've never had the extra scratch for a Mac. I've been able to do some basic tinkering with the hardware and that's about it.
Fast forward to yesterday. My new neighbor is telling me about his woes with his Mac and just how expensive it is to fix. With all the stuff he's telling me, I get the impression that he doesn't believe he's getting jacked over. Which is insane to me with all of the things he's telling me Firsttech has done that have failed to fix the single issue he's been having.
So let's start out with his issue. He's getting a kernel panic. Basically the Mac wigs out, the screen goes dark and a message pops up that says he needs to restart his computer. At first, Firsttech said that it was, without a doubt, the hard drive, then they said it was the memory, then finally they said it was the CPU. All in all wanting my new neighbor to spend something in the area of $1500 on his old G4 tower + $250 for "data recovery." (For reference, there are G4s, G5s and then the new Macs with Intel processors. It would be like a computer repair shop asking you to pay what you paid for your computer when it was new, after it breaks down when it's 8 years old.) So my neighbor says "No way, put it back to the way it was." Gets charged the labor, which I suppose is fair enough, and has had a G4 Paperweight laying around until he can figure out something to do with it.
So now I have the Mac. And with as little experience with Macs as I have, I know what these guys are saying is BS. First off, most of that $1500 price tag was from the CPU. They quoted him at $1000 for a G4 processor alone. Now when I say CPU some people might think the box under the desk. No no, smaller still, just the little chip that's under the heatsink inside the box. First off, you can't buy them new. They haven't made them for a number of years now. What one would have to do is buy a used G4 computer and yank the processor out of that one. You can find used G4s on Craig's List pretty easily and for pretty cheap.
But the CPU being bad is BS anyways. CPUs don't just go bad over night, and they don't go bad in a way that causes subtle problems like this. To make your CPU go bad, unplug all of your computer's fans and watch it over heat, or plug your computer in to a tall, metal rod during a thunder storm. That's about all that I can think of that is going to jack over your CPU.
The "data recovery" fee is a joke and a half. $250 is pretty expensive to normal human beings. So it must have sounded like a good number. But I know of businesses who do ACTUAL data recovery. Like they have a clean room and they transfer hard drive platters from non-working drives to known working drives. These places rarely charge less than $1,000 for data recovery. It's worth it.
But what these Firsttech jackholes are going to do is say "Okay, we've got the charge for data recovery." Grab a Firewire cable, boot the broken Mac in to Target Mode (this mode turns the Mac in to a giant, external hard drive.) and plug the other end of the cable in to another Mac or a PC or whatever and copy over the data and burn it to disc.
This technically is data recovery but it's not worth $250. This is something you can do in your home. I had to go a more roundabout way of getting his data because I don't have a Firewire cable. But I got his data. It didn't take me very long, I didn't have to babysit the process and it just wasn't worth $250 of my time.
As a side note. My neighbor also had two G3 towers that he wanted to see if he could use any of the parts to beef up his machine. Firsttech told him "No, the parts are completely incompatible." I opened up one of the G3s and suddenly my neighbor has 3x the amount of memory he had, and there was also a 120 gigabyte hard drive which will replace his 80 gigabyte hard drive. Incompatible. BAH!
In summary, Firsttech is out to charge you whatever they can for whatever they can get you to believe that you need. Failtech. In the end in one, barely interrupted evening, I got his data, I upgraded his RAM and he'll have half again the amount of hard drive space he started with. If I were charging labor alone, it wouldn't have cost $250. As it is, I don't charge anything 'cause helping people with their computer problems is fun for me.
