Everything has been moving quite quickly and under full load here in South Burlington. With school back in session and a busy summer carrying over into the new season, our turnaround times haven’t been higher since I first started here. With all of the newer models that have come out within the last two years, new problems have arisen with new solutions.
These days a lot of portables (AKA laptops) have been coming in with a new issue: No power, doesn’t turn on, and will not charge. This particular problem requires normal diagnostics and so the machine would get queued to be looked at by the next available tech. Once the machine makes it to the front of the line, it is often the case that I have grabbed the machine to begin testing and have noticed that the battery is stone cold dead. No juice in it whatsoever. I plug the machine in and wait. The MagSafe power adapter light will come on green, then change to amber, signaling that its charging the battery, then a few minutes later once the battery has enough power, the computer will self power on, which is normal, and then will pass all our testing.
Its believed that this issue is a caused by software bug within the firmware, the base system that manages the hardware. We also believe that this symptom could also be caused by a power surge. Since its hard to diagnose without the ability to dive into the firmware and if there is no sign of a surge, such as burned-out circuits, all we can do is give it a clean bill of health after it passes our testing and send the machine home. If your Apple laptop is experiencing this symptom, try putting it away for a few days before trying to power it on again. Leave it unplugged, closed and alone and it may power on when you try it in a couple days. Otherwise feel free to visit us at Small Dog Electronics and we can run diagnostics just to be sure.
In other news, our backup system is running much better now that the compression and deletion process are almost automated. We have plenty of space for backups on our RAID and our external hard drives are selling like hot cakes. We can’t stress this enough: Having a backup system at home is priceless (see Erich’s article above for an easy way to make this happen). Many a time I have had to break the news to a customer that their data is unrecoverable and that the only way to get it back would be to use DriveSavers, a data forensics company. Their services are expensive, but if the data is that important, they are the ones to try to get it off the failed storage module.
On one last note, with college back in session the number of liquid spilled machines has started to climb again. (editor’s note: All non-alcoholic beverages of course.) Liquids near electronics need to be watched closely. When liquid spills onto any electronic device, that device is usually fried pretty quickly. In very rare cases a machine has dried out and started working again, but these are extremely few and far between.