A 17-inch MacBook Pro came in last week because it would not respond to trackpad gestures. This 2.6GHz model had just been upgraded with a solid state drive and 6GB of RAM, and was in perfect physical condition. The customer explained that he swapped in his old hard drive in an attempt to fix the problem. No such luck unfortunately.
Because I ran into the same problem (and a few others) quite recently, I was able to identify the problem quickly at the check-in window, helping the customer avoid further costly downtime. In the About This Mac window I learned that the machine was running 10.5.0, the very first release of Leopard. All he needed to do was run Software Update to get up to a current version of the operating system.
The problem here is that this customer’s MacBook Pro was manufactured after the initial release of Leopard. While most of the computer’s functionality was intact, some of the snazzier features like trackpad gestures were not supported in this first release of Leopard. I offered to complete the updates on the spot using our blazing-fast software update server, and in about 2 minutes every update was transferred to his computer and began installing. In less than ten minutes, the problem was resolved and the computer was 100% up to date.
Have you done your software updates recently? If not, you can complete them by selecting Software Update from the Apple menu and following the instructions. Updates through the Software Update function are always safe and recommended installations.