Over the past few months, Teresa's MacBook Pro battery has been horribly unreliable. It lasts 45 minutes at best, and will even die within a couple hours while in sleep mode. So she did some research, found the pertinent information by googling and checking Apple.com's support forums, and calling Apple, since we paid for the AppleCare extended warranty.

Big mistake.

Why? Because she did the calling. Even though she knows her way around a computer better than most people, she got to listen to, "OK, do you see the apple in the upper right corner? Click that, and you'll see, 'About this Mac...'," even though she already had the pertinent battery page open in System Profiler. Even after she told them that, they still tried to walk her through every step of the way, making the call last a whole lot longer than necessary.  read more »