14 July 2009

Since Apple released the 10.5.7 system update — and I installed it — the MacBook Pro that runs Dressed In Value hasn’t been doing so well. My problems haven’t been as terrible as some, but have been particularly annoying.

It began with a reboot that took me to a blank, black screen. A phone call to Apple Care got me up and running again, and also got me in the habit of unplugging the machine and temporarily removing the battery to “fix” it whenever it blacked out again, which has been often. This measure does something like drain the ‘short term memory’ of the computer. (I’m a bit of a computer nerd, but not that much.)

Yesterday I installed the Safari 4.0.2 update, which required restarting, and it unsurprisingly brought me to a blank screen. Per my new routine, I unplugged it, took the battery out for a while, and turned it back on. But, nothing happened. I called Apple Care. They had me do a few things, none of which worked. They scheduled an appointment for me with an Apple Genius today at our local Apple store.

I tried turning the thing on throughout the day, but it wouldn’t boot. Miraculously, though, or something, last night it booted up just fine. That was kind of annoying, because I had lost an entire day of work to…what? It booted up fine this morning, too. I decided to take it in today anyway.

So, I went, described all this to Wil, my Apple Genius, and he took it out back to run it through some diagnostics testing. Another miracle, or something, took place. It wouldn’t boot up again for him. At least he wouldn’t think I was crazy. Wil said it’s probably the logic board, or something I think he called I/O, or maybe it’s the video card, or maybe even hard drive failure.

Today is Tuesday. They can fix it in 3-5 business days, but usually within 2-3 days. That means Thursday or Friday at the earliest, and that means that I can’t do much work this week, and some people besides just me will be unhappy because of it. Good news is that the computer will soon again be like new, and I won’t have lost any data. (I keep a backup of my data; the last of which was about a week ago.) I’m still here with email and some work I can do via a web browser, though.

Computers are great, aren’t they? Oh well.