July 17, 2014
A couple of weeks ago one of the webcomickers I read had a catastrophic Macbook failure... of the "oh shit I just dumped my coffee on it" variety. They took their now-deceased laptop to the Apple Store, and after some poking and prodding by the techs had to buy a new one.
It's a shitty thing when an expensive computer dies.
But it did remind me of the old Macbook Pro I had sitting in the back of the back bedroom's closet. When it first died I was certain that the logic board had gone -- it had sat there cooking itself all day after all -- and eBayers wanted as much for a used motherboard as I paid for the HTPC I replaced the laptop with. Which is why it sat for so long.
But this person's problems reminded me that the thing was sitting there, so I fished it out and took it to a repair place not far from where I work. After some poking and prodding... the only bad part was the hard drive. Somehow it managed to scorch the drive while not finishing off the CPU cores. Let's hear it for small miracles.
A replacement SSD later, and it's basically as good as new. Even the battery still seems to be in decent shape, though I can't remember how long it used to hold a charge for. It seems like I have all my computers up and running again.
Edit, 9:38 PM: Not quite as good as new -- I left it asleep after charging it last night, and when I got home from work the battery was at 10%. At a rough guess that gives me about 22.2 hours in sleep mode before it runs out of juice. Not bad for a seven-year-old battery that had been sitting inert for four years, but it probably still ought to be replaced at some point. Luckily batteries are fairly easy to come by even for this old model I have.
Time Machine is up and running, and I copied some things to sift through for later off my old backup drive. And downloaded my MP3 library off the PC. Aside from the one-button trackpad and misplaced accelerator key it feels almost like a real computer :)
