About a year later I got AppleCare for my laptop which added 2 more years of warranty coverage.
Aside from a couple of exploding batteries that were replaced under warranty and one that wasn't it provided consistent and reliable service up until August of this year
August 14, 2012
Pulled it out from it's Waterfield sleeve at work and noticed it did not awaken from sleep mode. Decided to do a hard reboot. It rebooted, and rebooted, and rebooted. Looping chimes. Greyscale plaid came up on the screen. A couple of my coworkers started laughing, thinking it was some sort of joke. Did all of the usual diagnostic stuff, safe reboot, zapping the PRAM, resetting the SMC, booting up from a diagnostic disc, nothing worked.
Looked up the issue online and saw that the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processors caused a higher than normal rate of failure.
