I should have taken my laptop in a long time ago??? What was I thinking???
My MacBookPro was purchased in May of 2006. About a month after making the purchase, the left cooling fan began to grind ever so slightly, nothing major, but it made enough noise to be annoying. That lasted about a year. Approximately, around May (1 full year after initial purchase) the fan began to hum and grind much louder. I actually downloaded some software to see what the RPM’s of the fan were and turns out, it would surge to over 5,000 RPMs when it’s suppose to run normally around 500 to 900 RPMs.
Around that same time, i experienced a serious melt-down after doing a simple update. Turns out, i had to completely rebuild my hard-drive with a new OS and fortunately, I had a sprinkling of backups on an external Firewire drive. It was still very painful, but I managed to get through it.
On or around mid-summer, it started acting weird again and yet again, it died, causing me to completely rebuild. This time, I wasn’t so lucky as I had just used the Firewire to rebuild Jodi’s laptop not less than a week before and had wiped all of my backups. The plan was to get the automated backups running again, but I was yet again lazy and didn’t get it started in a timely fashion.
After much pain and suffering, rebuilding from memory, it took well over 3 weeks to get it back to any semplance of normalcy. I still find things to this day missing from that install and shrug and hit the side of my head with a DOH!!!
Fast forward to November 9th, 2007. It literally died yet again. This time, it limped for a day or so, but by the Saturday the 10th, it was officially freakin dead and I decided to just let Apple have it back. So, I booked an appointment with the Genius Bar over at the Applestore in Boulder for Sunday the 11th at 10:45AM. The soonest they could see me when I went online Friday night.
Fortunately, I had everything backed up and on Friday, while it “limped” along, I was able to get it turned on in target mode and copy anything I was worried about over to the external Firewire drive using Dylans iBook. All was well and I was confident that I had everthing for when it would be back on my desk in a few weeks and I’d be ready to get back to work.
In the meantime, I confiscated Dylans iBook and moved a few critical items over, temporarily using his little faithful iBook. First things first, I found I couldn’t open anything of significance. I suppose that’s due to it only 256mb of RAM. Yuck!!! It’s a wonder Dylan could get anything done.
So, off to BestBuy I trot and purchased him a 1gb RAM chip… back to the house, installed in less than a minute and I was back off to the races. Ah…. RAM breathing room. His little laptop chugged along as I pounded away using FireWorks and Photoshop. Wasn’t as fast as my MacBook, but it was working, more than I could say for my laptop. I pretty much used it heavily most of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday working on several web sites, updating our Rental site and preparing some graphics for the gift certificates we’d been planning on marketing via email. I was getting pretty settled in and planned on using his iBook through Thanksgiving, figuring Apple would take a week or so, then blame the delay on the holidays.
Here’s where I got blown away. First thing Wednesday, TODAY, I got a call from the Genius Bar over at the Applestore. My laptop was back and I could come by and pick it up anytime. They informed me that they had to replace the entire mother-board and install a new hard-drive, plus they installed the latest OS, 10.4.10… all good as new. All that in 3 days, with two shiopments to and from California.
Okay, I was VERY pleased to say the least. While it’s been a pain in the backside, I usually CANNOT do without my laptop. I use it 7 days a week and being without it for a few days is just never a good time. I’d always figured I’d just wait until it physically blew up and quit working. Well, that’s what I did, suffered through for 3 whole days and voila’ it’s back and seems to be running like a champ.
Dylan gets a full gig of RAM out of the deal as “rental” on his iBook and I agreed to replace his keyboard, which he’d spilled some liquid substance on and has been using an external keyboard. All-in-all, he made out like a bandit. I was still able to get work done for 3 days and I rearranged a few things on my desk and added a one of the new cool flat keyboards offered by Apple. $49 bucks for a wired version. I remember when these use to run $79 and they weren’t this nice. This thing is quiet and has a very small foot print on the desk.
So, now I’m asking myself, why the H-LL didn’t I take it in sooner and just bit the bullet? I’ll never know.
Now, it’s back and I’m off to restore all of my important data and get back to work.
Posted: November 14th, 2007 under theMac.
Comments: none