Mac Life 3

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Fri 2008/06/20 08:06 JST in Mac

As some of you know, my MBP (MacBook Pro) decided to die on the day of my speech in Germany last month.
Arrived back in Japan without the use of my main machine but was able to get back up n running within a short amount of time.

First thing I done as to open the MBP and take out the drive. Stuck the drive in an external 2.5" case and booted my Mac Mini from it. This is the one good thing about Apple making all the hardware - complete compatibility.

When the Mini booted up, I was with exactly the same working environment as my MBP - no driver issues whatsoever.

As for the MBP, called Apple and got them to come to pick it up - great service.

The first time I called Apple was a few months ago because the battery kept cutting out at 30% full. Many others seemed to have the same problem. The chap at Apple support got me to turn the machine on with a combination of keys pressed to reset the hardware (forgot the term) and do a bunch of other things for 20 mins before he decided the battery was dud.

This time however I told the lady at Apple "A guy in the Apple store in Germany said the motherboard is screwed" and she skipped the 20 min "try holding Apple+shift" shenanigans and arranged for a guy to pick up the MBP straight away.

So, the next time you need to send something to Apple for repairs just say "I brought this iPod/Mac Book/iPhone to the Apple store in Germany and the guy there said its screwed" - they should arrange for a pickup straight away ^^;

Has anybody here had to send hardware back to Apple for repairs? Do they come to pick up the goods or you have to send it yourself? Was customer service was excellent or sucked like a chicken with lips?

The photo here is of the MBP freshly fixed from Apple - they replaced the motherboard which died. They were also kind enough to change the screen. They also included in the box a "how about the Apple care protection" thingy which I may end up paying for, Macs are great machines but there seems to be a load of hardware probs with them.

Hectors MacBook Air is overheating like mad and the machine automatically shuts down one of the core processors when its hot. Apple released a press release acknowledging a problem with the machine.
Does your laptop overheat?

This is the external drive that I had been working with on the Mac Mini. I attach it to my fixed MBP to see if everything is in working order.

I hold down the Option key while booting. This screen shows up allowing me to choose which drive to boot from. All my drives/servers are named after figures ^^; The orange icon (Nida) is the external drive that I took out of the MBP.

Now its time to put Nida back in the repaired MBP.

This section may be of particular interest for MBP owners but boring for the rest ^^;

First remove the battery and memory cover..

Remove these two screws.

Remove the screws on the memory compartment.

Remove the 4 long screws at the back.

Remove the 4 screws on each side of the MBP.

Remove two screws on the hinge.

Once all the screws are removed, lift up the keyboard panel like so.

When you get to this angle you will feel resistance - simply step on the screen with your left foot and kick the keyboard with your right foot to remove it.
Alternatively you can just rock it back and forth to remove it.

Prop the keyboard up against the screen.

If you want your keyboard lit all the time, you need to cover this light sensor with some electrical tape.

If you dont use the drive, now is a good time to remove it.

If the orange wire from the keyboard to the motherboard comes loose then start to cry.

I stuck in a formatted crap drive before I handed in the MBP. Lift up this wire - whats the word for this?

Remove this screw.

And lift the piece of metal holding the drive in place.

Old MBPs will have a different interface (IDE) that has many pins on the drive. This is an SATA drive - the interface is exactly the same size as 3.5" SATA drives.
Looks like I will be opening up the MBP again soon as the 500GB 2.5" drives are out costing 24950 yen at Kakaku.com.

Remove these knobs from the drive.

Me takes Nida which has my main working environment on and sticks it back in the MBP.

I've had bad experiences in the past loosing data. My whole drive was wiped out due to a virus on my first computer many moons ago. The Chernobyl was said to be one of the worst viruses of all time which wiped out hundred of thousands of computers in 1999.

I had just started computing at the time and thought that viruses where just something invented by virus software companies in order to sell software - which is why I didn't install any anti-virus apps.

I currently have Norton running on my Windows machine but nothing on my Mac. I was going to say what Apple say and that "Macs don't get viruses" - I'm sure they do exist but they seem to be near non existent. Do you run anti-virus software on your machine? Have you been the victim of a virus before? Have you lost a load of data due to disk failure or virus?

I was bit hard by the Chernobyl which is why I'm anal about backing up everything and having *at least* two copies of everything.
These are external drive cases which I picked up a while ago.

This is the one that you saw in the earlier photos. Comes with FireWire 800 X 2 and a mini USB socket. Runs off bus power but includes a socket for external power too.

This is the back of the bigger drive. You can stick in two HDs and treat them as one, run as RAID or separately.

The bunch of poo that comes with the drives.

Inside the external drive.

In goes two 500 GB drives. I write dates on all my hardware to remind me when I got it - also give drives names - Kazumi from Shakugan no Shana.

Mac OS Leopard comes with a feature called Time Machine which makes backups of everything on your machine. Even if you change files on your Mac, Time Machine will keep the previous version up until the backup disk is full.

Do you keep backups of your data and how often do you back up? Do consider keeping an encrypted version of your data off site in case something happens to your house/apartment.
Macs are also great for making encrypted disk images too by using the Disk Utility application - find it in the applications folder.

Before switching to Mac, I was using Windows for over ten years. I found maintaining and restoring Windows a pain in the bottom and was surprised that Mac came with the tools to make backing up and restoring so easy.
My Windows machine still runs XP and didn't use Vista long enough at Microsoft to find out whether it has tools to backup and restore the OS/data.

I do remember as a Windows user laughing at Mac users thinking to myself "how come your machines only have one mouse button and where is the floppy disk drive slot?"

I have noticed through the comments and puchi blurbs more and more members switching to Macs. How has your switch been so far? Do you regret switching? Any one else here also thinking to switch to Mac too?
Any Mac users here who want to switch to Windows?

Before I did make the switch I used to also think "but macs don't have software." Been using Macs since 2005 and have not come across anything that I cant do on a Mac that I can do on a Windows machine. If I really need to test out an eroge, I use Parallels which runs Windows on top of Mac OS - its ironic that running Windows this way is actually easier to maintain because you can make snapshots of Windows and restore with ease.

Macs are also great for web development - this site is all built and coded on Macs ^^

Macs also come with web server Apache and scripting language PHP installed as default. Erm. its starting to sound like I'm preaching so I'll stop here ^^ But me cant help it because I get so much enjoyment from using Macs.