Two and a half months later, the replacement parts for my defective iMac finally arrived.
From what I was told when I asked about the repair, only the disk, memory and outer shell are the same. Instead of replacing just the problem part (which I am assuming is something like the video inverter) they replaced almost the whole computer –motherboard, display, CPU– the works!
The good news is that so far I haven’t spotted a single dead pixel (always good to check for those with extreme care) and the screen is now legible with the brightness set to half the scale. It was getting to the point where full brightness was too dark even at night so this is a welcome change.
It also felt like the boot-up was much faster, but it might just be that I am hallucinating this due to being really tired and happy that the screen is so bright and pretty…
The next few weeks will be nail-biting as I wait for the screen to become darker and darker, like when I first got the iMac… Hope it doesn’t happen!
What I didn’t have time to do was to run the full hardware test on it. I have this thing about making sure that everything is really OK and I ran the test on the previous computer, but since this is mostly a new incarnation of it I will have to run them again. Of course with the memory I have installed running the full tests will take around two hours and last time it set off the fan at full blast for the full duration of the tests. Given the hour and my being dead-tired and the noise that the fan makes, I think I’ll leave it for the weekend when I’m out running all the million errands I have to run.
Time for bed now.