fedward, tumbling

goes on, and the heat goes on
~ Wednesday, December 9 ~
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Whenever I buy a new laptop I buy a second battery.  So when Apple issued a recall for defective batteries in the original MacBook Pro I had two of them replaced.  That was all well and good until this past January, when one of the replacement batteries went completely wacky (capacity would randomly fluctuate as the battery was used).  I took it into a local Genius Bar, at which point the Genius confirmed, and I quote, “that IS … odd.” So under AppleCare that one defective battery was replaced. Well, here we are again. Counting the two that were recalled, this is four defective batteries for one computer.  I know this isn’t actually Apple’s fault, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. And this time I don’t have AppleCare, since it ran out months ago. I will probably throw myself on the mercy of the Genius Bar and see if they come through, but I’m not expecting good news.

Whenever I buy a new laptop I buy a second battery.  So when Apple issued a recall for defective batteries in the original MacBook Pro I had two of them replaced.  That was all well and good until this past January, when one of the replacement batteries went completely wacky (capacity would randomly fluctuate as the battery was used).  I took it into a local Genius Bar, at which point the Genius confirmed, and I quote, “that IS … odd.” So under AppleCare that one defective battery was replaced.

Well, here we are again. Counting the two that were recalled, this is four defective batteries for one computer.  I know this isn’t actually Apple’s fault, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. And this time I don’t have AppleCare, since it ran out months ago. I will probably throw myself on the mercy of the Genius Bar and see if they come through, but I’m not expecting good news.

Tags: battery recall FAIL Apple MacBook Pro
~ Friday, September 25 ~
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

So shortly after I uploaded the noise my MacBook Pro was making it got even worse.  I pretty much took the time to sample the noise and then shut the whole computer down, and then pulled the plug and the battery, leaving it until such time as I could take it apart and confirm which fan needed to be replaced.

Such time happened to be this evening.  So I took the computer apart, and fired it up again with the keyboard off so I could figure out which fan was making the noise.

Only neither of them were making noise like that.  They were both working just fine.  I even started up a fan control program and spun them up to 6000 RPM, and they still sounded just fine.  I took the opportunity to vacuum out the innards of the computer, giving the fans extra attention just in case, and I removed all the keycaps and extracted a couple years’ worth of cat hair (this is not the first time I’ve done that, but I spent more time on it today, peeling apart the layers of the membrane to get as much hair out as possible).  I also took more care in reassembling the keyboard, so all the keys seem to be sitting a little more evenly and there are no loose corners.  The left cmd-key is a little stiff for some reason, but I’m sure that’ll be back to normal soon enough.

I still can’t figure out what was going on with the fan, but everything seems fine now.  The fans are quieter than they were before the disassembly, so I guess the vacuuming had some positive effect. I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t really do anything and the problem still went away, though.

Tags: fan macbook pro dying
~ Monday, September 21 ~
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The fan in my MacBook Pro is dying.

Tags: MacBook Pro fan dying