It was big news when Google announced IMAP for Gmail. Most e-mail providers and ISPs charge for IMAP—and then along comes Google offering the service for free. Many journalists hailed the virtues of IMAP and I was keen to try it, but being a poor boy I never thought it was worth paying for. So when I heard the announcement I could hardly wait for my Gmail account to be upgraded.

And wait I did. We were told that it would take a few weeks for the service to become available on all accounts. After a month I began to investigate. I found IMAP mentioned on Gmail's help pages where it said that it would only take a few days for the upgrades to carried out across all servers, but no explanation as to why I was left out.

Finding no answers I began to fiddle myself. I created a new account and sure enough IMAP was available. I then began to set up the new account when IMAP disappeared. It turns out, that IMAP becomes unavailable when the language is set to UK-English. I suspect that IMAP is currently only available for US-English accounts. Here's hoping that it becomes available for all languages.

The "Language" setting is the first one under the "General" tab within "Settings". Choose "English (US)" and then click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page. IMAP should now be available on the fifth tab across which should now read "Forwarding and POP/IMAP".

Earlier in the year my 12-inch PowerBook was nearing the end of it's 3 year AppleCare warranty. After checking it over, the only repair it needed was the replacement of a tiny missing screw. One always experiences mixed emotions at this stage of an extended warranty with a well behaved appliance. I was a little annoyed that I paid hundreds of dollars for what would be a small repair, but happy that the only thing that went wrong was to be easily fixed—things could have been worse. So in the hope of having the screw replaced I took the laptop to my local service centre.

Initially I had to wait two weeks as the repairer didn't have the screw in stock. The first wait of many.

When picking up my Mac I was surprised when the service lady asked me to pay just over AUD$12 (USD$10) in order to get my Mac back. When I asked why, she told me that there was no AppleCare recorded against my computer. Thinking that even $12 was expensive, I then asked if there was a service charge for fixing the screw in place. She said that there was no charge for such a simple operation and that the charge was purely the cost of the screw. That's one expensive screw! I was getting nowhere with the service person so I paid the 12-something dollars and decided to take the matter up directly with Apple at a later time.

The Apple person on the phone confirmed that the AppleCare I had purchased had not been recorded against my computer. Luckily I had receipts clearly showing that I had indeed purchased it for my laptop, and I was asked to fax them in and call back in a few days.

I called back several times over the course of the following month and had to fax the receipts again. Eventually the issue with the recording of the AppleCare was sorted out, even though it had since expired in the meantime, and I moved to be reimbursed for the screw.

More phone calls... I had to tell my story several times as the people who dealt with such claims were often busy and only worked limited hours. Eventually I was promised a cheque so I waited.

Over the course of the next few months I waited and called wondering where my cheque was. Eventually I began to lose my patience and demanded to talk with someone at Apple Australia—I had assumed that I had been dealing with an Indian call centre. The lady with whom I spoke with was very polite, considering how annoyed I had grown over the last 5 months. She explained to me that the screws were not covered as part of the AppleCare warranty. What?!?! Why didn't someone explain that to me earlier? I exclaimed that I had spent hundreds of dollars on an extended warranty, and that all I wanted was to be reimbursed for one tiny screw, and that I had been waiting months in order for that to happen. I asked how it is that the screws weren't covered, and the lady had no explanation. I then asked if AppleCare would cover my Mac if all of the screws fell out and the computer physically fell to pieces through no fault of my own. She said no. I could not believe it?

After five months of wrestling with Apple's after sales service and losing I felt well and truly screw-ed.

Exposé in Mac OS X is a fantastic feature—one could argue a necessary feature to make up for the lack of a task bar. I use it all the time, although I have no idea which function keys invoke it. If you haven't done so already, tie the "All Windows" switch of Exposé to the bottom-right corner of the screen (or to the bottom-left corner if you're left-handed). With this, invoking Exposé becomes a gesture—a quick flick of the wrist and you are presented with all of your visible windows.

Until OS 10.5 however there has been one major drawback in the use of Exposé. When you had a number of windows open of similar appearance (text documents for example) in order to select the one you wanted you were forced to mouse-over each window in turn to see its name. Now in 10.5 you can hold down the Option key and the name of each window will appear. Thank goodness! I had been hoping for this for quite some time. (Now the dock needs a similar feature for those who minimise a number of documents of the same kind.) Thanks to Rob Griffiths for this tip.

Now if Apple could only fix the when-all-open-windows-are-at-full-size bug in Exposé I'd be a very happy Mac user. (If you haven't seen this crazy behaviour before: open up TextEdit, hide all other applications, press command-N a number of times, click the green button in each window, and then invoke Exposé and see how efficiently the screen space is used.)

I had problems again this week with the Windows Update control panel in Vista. Try as I may it would keep failing, reciting the error number 8024400D. The fix, whilst simple, is somewhat odd and is one that I don't understand. You simply have to visit the "old" Windows Update website in Internet Explorer, which then kicks you back to a working Windows Update control panel.

What the heck does the website do to my computer that the control panel can't do? People more paranoid than myself may be worried by such a thought. And why would a functioning Windows Update spontaneously decide that it didn't want to work anymore? Ah... the mystery that is Windows continues with Windows Vista.

Update! After further investigation I think this problem is caused by deleting a particular cookie. By revisiting the Windows Update website, the cookie is resent.