For me, that day is today.

Friday morning, I found my iMac i7 locked up, and hot enough to fry an egg atop it. It was hot, hot, hot. From there, it was pretty well downhill — I couldn’t boot it, from the internal drive or the DVD, and eventually, it just died.

This morning, I took it to the Genius Bar at the West County Apple Store, preparing for the worst. Chris took good care of me, and apparently, I’d done all the right things — safe boot, Carbon Copy Cloner to get a copy of the drive, replicated the problem on a screen sharing session back to the iMac. From what he tells me, it sounds like the video card has gone kaput.

They have one in-stock at the store, and he thought they might be able to get it installed tonight. That would totally rock. With the winter storm coming in, I’m gonna need my Mac to process photos.

Wait… winter storm? Yep… there’s another coming. Read on…