new mac user: Macbook died 5 hours after purchase. What did I do wrong?

Hello,

After months of saving money and debating what to buy, I purchased yesterday my first laptop, which also happened to be my first mac (I am a long-time Windows user, but have already worked on desktop macs at my university), a 2.16 Ghz, 13.3", 2GB of RAM white Macbook. Happy happy, joy joy.

Everything went really fine at first. The machine was fast and responsive, the first boot went very smoothly. All happy with my purchase, I begin to charge the battery, install a few apps I need (nothing funky: Thunderbird, Opera, Cyberduck, NeoOffice), and marvel at how easy it is to connect my brand new shiny Macbook with my Desktop Vista machine over my router. All great.

The evening comes, I switch off my Macbook, walks back home, want to use it again, and gets a first kernel panic at boot. I try again, and get a few times the internatinal message about rebooting the laptop. After a few try, I finally manage to get into OSX, fire up Disk Utility, and try to check what's wrong. I then run into several problems:
-while permissions are all fine, verifying the disk itself never stops. It just freezes the whole machine
-Disk Utility crashes about 75% of the times, telling me it lost the connection with the Disk Management system, or something along this line.
-moving a small text file to the trash totally freezes the finder, which I have to force quite and relaunch.
-the fan is running at full force (or so it sounds) constantly.

Things were pretty bad at this point, all the more for a machine which was no more than 5 hours old. Anyway, I decide to wait till this morning to see if things had gotten any better. But today, I just can not boot the computer at all. Upon pressing the start button, I hear the Macbook checking the DVD drive, and the little white light on the front is lit, but the screen stays pitch black, the back apple doesn't lit up, and I can't do anything for the life of me.

To sum up: big bummer. I was really happy to finally be able to purchase this Macbook, it ran perfectly for a few hours, but now it's just a very expensive white plastic brick.
Of course, I'll bring it to the store tomorrow (they are closed today) and try to get it repaired or exchanged, but I have a few questions for people in this forum.

I did two things that might have caused these problems. Being a newbie on all things Macs, I'd like to know if one of them might have caused this total breakdown of the machine, or if I am innocent.

-the last time I shutdown the computer while everything was ok, I closed the lid before the shutdown process had ended (I clicked on "Shutdown", confirmed, and then closed the lid. Is this a problem, and should one wait for the computer to be all dead before closing it?

-I unplugged my ethernet cable (going to a router through which I was connected to my Vista box) without unmounting the drive I was connected to. There was no transfer going on at that time between the two machines, but was it a dumb thing to do? If yes, could it be the reason why the Macbook is now totally dead.

So, sorry for the long rant. I was really happy with this Macbook, and I hope I can get it fixed. But I'd just like to know if something I did was the cause of the problem, or if I just was unlucky and bought a defective laptop.

Thanks for your help.


PS: small question: is there a keyboard shortcut to select a whole line of text from the cursor till the beginning of the current line, comparable to "shift + home" in Windows?

 

I seriously doubt anything you did caused this to happen. Probably just a bad piece of hardware somewhere. It does happen on occasion.

 

Thank you. Then I hope that Apple or the reseller will be able to fix this. I just had a look at AppleDefects.com, and got pretty scared.

 

You definitely have warranty for this. Take it into the shops and they'll fix it.

 

worst case scenario? they will give you a brand new machine.

 

I wouldn't really have a problem with this. Obviously, it would cost some time to reinstall everything, but I don't have any personal data on this computer, considering how quickly it died. I just hope that the fix or the replacement comes quickly.

 

if you bought it from the store, just show them the kernal panic problem, and they will most likely hand you a new one.

unfortunately you will have to reinstall the software. back up your system in the future (not faulting you for this time) but hard drive failure happens,.

 

Yes, just like everyone said there is no way either of the things you did could brick your machine. I assume you have a faulty HDD.

 

Thank you all for these recommendation.

Another question (showing my Mac-newbiness): I read that the CDs coming with the Macbook contained utilities to diagnose or repair some disk problems. Is it possible to boot on them when the rest of the computer is totally dead (i.e. like in Windows, where you can boot on a system restore CD or DVD if your Windows install is dead), or do you need to have access to OSX to use these tools?

 

Yes, put the DVD install disk in the slot and press C when booting. Perhaps you need to put it while the Macbook is on and then restart. Or you may press Command+Option+Shift+del - I must confess I don't know this shortcut by heart, google for it.

 

I went to the store today, and it wasn't the HDD (the recovery CD couldn't boot), but the memory. Apparently, once of my RAM cards (1GB each) was boinked. The store exchanged it, and all is well now.