Well, I reported it in the Shoutbox yesterday, but I wanted to make it "official" today. My Macbook (black, Core 2 Duo) is in the hospital. On Monday night, I had just done an upload to Flickr, using iPhoto's Flickr Upload plugin, when the screen froze and suddenly nothing would respond. The hard drive made a grinding noise, and then silence. I managed to shut her down, and restarted but now she would not boot up, either from hard drive or CD/DVD-ROM - all attempts stayed at a white screen until eventually a folder with a question mark popped up (the generic Apple icon for "I can't find a useable system folder").I brought her to the Apple Store in Farmington, CT last night and "Dr. Josh" took a quick look at her hard drive and confirmed it was "dead, dead, clickety-click, dead". They are ordering a new HD for me, and will install it and reimage it. Luckily, I had just done a backup before I installed iLife/iWork '08, so I won't lose too much.
In the meantime, I am writing this on an old PC laptop running Ubuntu. It is not a bad alternative, but I really miss my Mac. Nothing beats the ease-of-use or the feel of home.
