Yay, my MacBook is back from the repair depot! I would have had it sooner, if the “Genius” recognized the bad section of my HD and sent my lappy out for service from the store. Since I wasn’t charged for the “Genius” service, I’m not going to complain too much.

Thanks to the ease of restoring user preferences, I did not have much to do with a clean HD. I installed the base 10.4.6, transferred apps from the trusty PowerBook, imported my user information, and system updates, resulting in a fully cloned system within one hour and a half.

I’m back to being the subversive mac user in the sea of windows pc users here in the enterprise… excelsior!