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Impending Tech Melt-down
Apr 27How long do you expect your technology purchases to last? My venerable workhorse laptop, a 1st Generation MacBook Pro, has been, I recently learned, crashing due to overheating. Neither of its cooling fans are working. I should have been able to detect this months earlier, but I had neglected to reinstall a system monitoring utility the last time I rebuilt my hard drive, and so didn’t have the obvious indicators in front of me. Bjango makes a great little widget application called iStat Pro, which can be configured to give you as much or as little information as you are ever likely to need to monitor the health of your Mac.
So Apple, I have generally been pretty happy with your offerings over the last 25 years (THAT long?), and certainly this MBP has been a workhorse for me, pretty much key to any living I’ve made in the last 4 years. With this current issue, I have just realized that there has been a problem with heat dissipation for quite some time now, and simply didn’t think there was any issue until the frequency of crashing entered the realm of many times a day.
The opinion now coalescing in my stressed out brain (I can’t live without my computer! Really, it’s my livelihood) is that this situation has been developing for some time. I now recollect, in the distant past, the fans racing like Formula 1 Ferraris under the heavy foot of a Schumacher. It wasn’t until I browsed through the Apple Support Discussion Forums, armed with the error code revealed by the Hardware Diagnostics app that came with the MBP (where the hell did I put those discs? Oh, up there.) did I realize that something was very, very wrong. People on the ASDFs reported logic board replacements, heat sensor replacements, AppleCare being invoked many, many times, leverage being applied to to senior AppleStore managers to get a decent resolution, etc.
“So what?” you may say. “Stuff breaks down all the time. That’s what the world is like.” OK, I’ll agree with you on a lot of things. Cars need tuneups & oil changes, wheels aligned and tires replaced. But shouldn’t a laptop be designed (and have that design tested) to ensure that a key part of it’s continuing function, cooling, continues to function to the usable life of the computer? Eh. That raises the question of “What is the usable life on a MacBook Pro?”
Longer than I’ve owned this one for. Other than the fans, and a new, bigger hard drive which I replaced myself, it’s been a great machine. If I also want to replace the fans myself, I can’t get source the parts in Canada, so I’ve either got to send the MBP in to get fixed—way out of either warrantee or AppleCare—or mail-order to the USA for the correct parts (with all the grossly inflated shipping, time, etc., incurred), then spend 1–2 hours tearing my machine apart. Oh joy. I’d better make sure I get the correct part numbers…
Ah well.
Update
I finally got the fans (Thanks to MacStation Yaletown—$37 each!), put aside some time, arranged my tools and repurposed a foam egg carton as a parts repository, then reviewed the procedure on iFixit.com’s amazing site—if you have any kind of aptitude with tools, are reasonable organized, and have more time than money, give it a try—and suddenly I’ve got a machine that can cool itself again!