Tech News Vermont

I received a call yesteday that my broken MacBook pro was fixed. This was welcomed news. My podcast has been on hold for weeks and with the new semester upon us I have alot of work to do. Late summer is the worst time for me to be without my mac.

Ormsby’s replaced the top case, the motherboard, and the ram. It’s should have been like having a new laptop. Should have been…

The top case includes the keyboard and the freshly installed keyboard seemed odd to me. The keys were slightly different. After a few seconds I realized I was looking at a French keyboard. No big I called Ormsbys to let them know and they’re ready to swap it out with an American English top case.

The problem was that the airport card was again intermittently missing and the machine was unusable on the 9600 chipset.

I called Apple this time and they suggested a backup and a reload. Already been there but why not try again. It took forever to get the full backup done and I still haven’t been able to reinstall the OS. The darn thing keeps freezing up during the install.

More this afternoon. I’m expecting a call from Applecare at one.

I had to return my Macbook Pro to Ormsby’s today, it continues to freeze up.  They are going to order a new logic board and that should clear up the problem.  Many users on the Apple support forums are reporting this type of problem with the late 2008 macbook pro.

Until my main machine returns there won’t be any podcasts.  I’m working to fix that problem for the future, but this week looks fairly sketchy as far as the podcast goes.

My main machine, a late 2008 15 inch macbook pro, has been experiencing lock ups.  It’s not tied to anything in particular. I’ll be working along in Garageband, Word, Pages, Excel, Xcode, or World of Warcraft and everything stops.  The screen doesn’t go black, it just freezes.  The only way to get the machine to respond is to press and hold the power button and restart.  Of course you lose everything you were working on.

I took it into Ormsby’s in Barre.  They are central Vermont’s Apple service center.  I explained what was going on with the computer.  This is one of the those problems that are hard to explain and difficult to replicate.  Allen was great, he was able to replicate the lock up and ran several diagnostics.  Apple suggested that we swap out the RAM.

The new RAM made the lock ups less frequent.  I had three yesterday, which is much less frequent than before, but the machine continues to freeze for no reason.  It goes back into Orsmby’s today for a new motherboard.

When I get the laptop back I can start recording the next podcast.