I’ve owned my MacBook for
about 18 months now, which is coming close to a record for me. I was
looking at replacing it with a new laptop — preferably something running
Ubuntu that doesn’t totally look like ass. I
started looking and saw things I liked from both Dell and System
76 (I really wanted to like
Zareason, especially given that they’re local,
but System 76 kills them on pricing).
But then I looked closer at the Wikipedia article on MacBooks, the
System Profiler on my machine and just what I was paying for. It was
then I realized that my MacBook already has a Core 2 Duo T7200,
as well as 802.11n support. With most of the economical Dell options
still using T5xxx series processors (with it’s 2MB L2 cache, compared
to the T7200’s 4MB), it became clear I was mostly investing in more
RAM and a larger hard drive. A quick look showed I could take my
system from 1.5GB RAM to 4GB for $50[1]_ and could go from the 120GB
stock hard drive to a 320GB model for $100. And with the extra drive
space I could comfortably run Ubuntu as my primary operating system,
retaining the Mac OS X partition until I have all the apps replaced.
So that was my task for yesterday. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite
as well as planned. When I put the new hard drive in and tried to power
things back on… nothing. No chime, no video, no spin up. Nothing. Sigh.
I managed to get an 8 AM appointment at the Apple Genius Bar, but I was
pretty bummed about it last night. This morning, however, things turned
out OK. Not fantastic but OK.
Brian, my assigned Genius,
suggested that the problem might be the “top case” — literally the top
of the case, containing the keyboard and power switch. After pulling it
off and putting on a new one, things fired right up. So another $150
later, all is well.
Brian was actually really nice and helpful about the whole situation
(almost making me regret calling Apple the “corporate asshole du jour”
on Saturday, but not quite). As I write this I realize how strange it is
that I consider this a surprising exception. Next up: Ubuntu
installation and configuration.
date: | 2008-08-11 09:49:42 |
wordpress_id: | 627 |
layout: | post |
slug: | laptop-rejuvenation |
comments: | |
category: | geek |
tags: | apple, macbook, service |