AppleCare win X2 (and small fail)

About a month ago the hard disk in my 13" MacBook made a dreadful squeal and stopped working. Fortunately I didn't really have anything on there that I couldn't part with and I was pretty sure my AppleCare was still current. I hunted around and found my AppleCare certificate and my heart sank when I read the expiry date of 12/4/2009. Three months expired :(.

"Wait a minute", I thought, "I bought my laptop at the end of the year". Back to searching and I found my receipt and sure enough the purchase date was Dec 2006. My mind was starting to warm up and I realised the date in the certificate is formatted the American way. Cue large sigh of relief.

Off to the local service centre and a week and a bit later I had my MacBook back with a new hard disk. Amusingly, the OS installed was 10.4.11, the last version of Tiger, which was the operating system installed when I bought the laptop. I had already updated to Leopard prior to the hard disk crash and had the CD for the newer OS. The next two or three hours of my life were spent re-installing Leopard and downloading Apple Software Updates.

Then, over the next week or two, I dragged my email logs and desktop hard disks for software licences I had purchased and set about re-establishing my work environment on the laptop. And then my keyboard stopped working.

Well, not completely, just a few keys, but important keys, especially for a programmer. Keys like '=', '~', and the arrows. Back to the service centre. Three days later I get an SMS telling me it is ready to pick up, which I do, and too my surprise the trackpad is new, as is the keyboard and the whole upper assembly of the body. I first noticed when I went to move the mouse cursor and noticed the track pad was much rougher than I remembered.

So, kudos to the AppleCare program. Two service requests and two fixes under warranty.

The fail? Apart from the unexpected date formatting in the AppleCare certificate, when I picked up my laptop today it hadn't been shutdown and the battery was at 25%. That, to me, is just unprofessional.

Now, I am off to find the AppleCare certificate for my iMac, which I think is either expired or, if not, very close to expired, and see if I can extend it.