Waiting for men in white coats

... To come and take the Mac away. OK, so they probably won't be
wearing white coats. I'm just happy that after months of slow
performance and sudden freezes, someone from the FNAC helpline finally
admitted that yes, it could be a hardware problem, and that they would
indeed repair or replace, instead of telling me to do yet another
clean install and implying that I "don't know how to use the Mac".

Actually that wasn't implied, that was actually said out loud. Right,
so for instance all I've got running are Safari and iTunes, out of the
blue the computer freezes and won't respond to trying to force quit
the programs, the disk utility warns that the hard drive is failing,
and it might be my fault because I don't know how to use a Mac? Wanker.

Anyway, here's hoping it gets sorted, and thank goodness we were
obsessive about backing up files!