I scheduled an appointment at the Apple Store tomorrow to have my laptop looked at, and I'm unsure if I want to go through with it. I'm a little torn.

The random shut downs are somewhat less frequent, but it's not a useful device when you can't reliably use it. My thought is that I could take it in and have them do the flat-fee repair, at $300 and change. If I can't get it to die on them, I can claim the "whine" problem, a well known defect that causes a high-pitched noise when it operates on battery power. The fix for that is to replace the logic board, which is where the power hardware lives, so it would get me to the same place.

But being a little more careful with my money, I do have some concerns. First off, that's $300+ that could go toward a new computer. With the rebates still in effect, $1,400 more gets a new, faster computer with a bigger hard drive. I planned to replace it early next year anyway. I'm torn. If I end up doing consulting work, I could definitely use the bigger drive to store more virtual machines and essentially have a different one for work stuff.

The other thing is that I'd eventually like to give this one to Diana so she's not fighting Vista on her Dell, and yelling at it when it doesn't wake up from sleep.

The immediate short term has no consequence from non-action, since I can use my desktop and its quad-core goodness. But I miss having the laptop to work on the couch, or at a restaurant, or on the deck.

What would you do?