Firstly, the recommendation... I bought the airport extreme base station the other day and was expecting it to be a nightmare to set up & password (about a year ago I tried setting up a Linksys wireless router, the instructions were awful & it never worked properly) but I couldn't believe how SIMPLE it was and it works like a dream. I've used an ethernet cable to connect my old PC (still use it to download stuff like 24 & Lost!) and then my MacBook Pro & my Mac Pro are both wireless. I can also set-up wireless printing but haven't got round to that quite yet.

Secondly, I've had a Mac Pro (quad-core - IT ROCKS!!!) for just over a year and very, very occassionally I'll start it up and it makes a whirring noise like a fan is coming on inside and it doesn't switch on. I press the power button again and it starts up as normal. I guess over the past year it's done it about 15-20 times, one of which was this morning. My issue is, I have heaps of work on at the moment so being without it for a couple of weeks isn't an option. I'm also concerned that they won't find what's wrong because it only does it once in a blue moon and of course it won't do it while it's in their possession!! My question is, has anyone else had any kind of problem like this & if so what was the problem exactly?

whoa - sounds weird. i have a quad G5 so i know that doesn't help much, but i haven't ever had anything like that happen. those fans sure make your computer sound like its gonna take off though, eh?

my advice: call applecare (i sure hope you purchased applecare with your computer!) and see what they might have to say.

thats the best i can do at the moment. hopefully this *bump* will get a few more hits and responses to your post!

good luck

The first thing you should do if you have not already: back up your data to an external device. The last time I heard of something similar was with a Dell D620 - the case fan wigged out causing a short that ate the motherboard and boot disk. The user had to pay around $500 PER Gigabyte to get DriveSavers to pull what they could from the dead disk. Dell replaced everything else obviously under warranty but the data .... ahhhh the data.

along the lines of what jonathon said - get a western digital MyBook (premium edition) external hard drive and back everything up to that. probably grab at least a 250GB drive (preferrably a 500gb) and use the .mac BACKUP program to back up your entire boot disk to the drive. then if anything should ever happen, you can just restore your entire system to a new hard drive.

Thanks to both of you for the advice & info

I keep meaning to call AppleCare but (yeah, yeah there shouldn't be any buts!)...

As for back-up, my important work is on my Lacie drive but thanks for the info on the .mac backup program - I'll look into it.