iMac, no display, going in for service, what can I expect?

[Shivetya]

My white iMac, 24 with 7600GT, no longer has a display. I guess World of Warcraft finally killed it. Yeah, I am blaming WOW. Was playing in windowed mode and the game window went all bizarre, heavily distorted. While doing so the system was locked up. Beach ball everywhere and force quit was not working.

Eventually it allowed me to force quit WOW. I restarted the system thinking that just the game was hosed but next time I started the game I got all of 4 characters of my account name in before the system froze. Only thing that worked was the mouse and that was only good for making the beach ball go around the screen. Had to hard power it off (button hold).

Well no screen now. Reset failed too (nvram reset?). System boots finem does the nice tone, mouse comes on, caps lock flashes, but no display. White light is solid. Apple phone support finally decided that I need to take it in.

So what should I expect? Whats the average turn around on failed systems? My luck the damn thing will work once they get it. That would be best. It is going to Microcenter here in Marietta Georgia as they are the most convenient and only location I recognized from the the list the Apple guy gave me.

 

[Shivetya]

Well I have learned the following.

1. Don't expect to get it back anytime soon. I might see it on 11th if I am lucky, nearly two weeks after it went in.

2. Go find a REAL Apple store that does repair. Unfortunately that wasn't the option I was presented with... so I ended up at a Microcenter, which while authorized apparently has no priority in actually fixing anything.

3. Never assume Apple will ship the place repairing it the right parts. Wrong circuit board, wrong video card... the serial number on the machine states what it is...


I can only hope I get it back after two weeks. Damn if my parents didn't short out a Dell I gave them for Christmas and Dell showed up the next day after they called and swapped motherboards to make it work.

I guess I should have spent over $2k to get at home

 

[shakir]

they'll probably change your video card. same thing happened to me. not exactly, but similar. i use to play warcraft frozen throne on my imac and it gets pretty hot where the graphic card is. i believe it's an overheating issue. at first, it causes distortion in graphics. e.g. when i open google earth. finally, it killed my display. i sent it in, they said it was a graphic card issue and changed it(took them exactly 8 days)

happy to say, there's no more graphic distortion and i'm getting rid of all the games in my imac.