Category: Repair of the Week

A MacBook Pro came in last week because it refused to render the “d” character when its key was pressed. This is bizarre behavior that I hadn’t seen before; usually when a customer reports this sort of problem, technicians don’t immediately believe it. We confirmed it was an issue and tried an external keyboard first.…

This week’s repair is on a first-generation MacBook that had a very slight amount of water spilled on it. The customer did everything right: he immediately turned off the computer and removed the battery, and left it alone in a warm place for ten days. An attempt to fire up a spilled-on computer generally makes…

A long time customer came in the other day and requested that a new keyboard be installed into his MacBook. On this model MacBook, the keyboard is integrated into the top case, which also includes the trackpad, wrist rest area, and power button. We assumed he wanted the part replaced due to small cracks on…

This week’s repair boggled my mind. A 2.33GHz MacBook Pro came in with the simple problem of not booting up from its internal hard drive. I usually start up holding down the Apple and S keys to get into single user mode, and use fsck (file system consistency check; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck) to check and attempt repair…

As part of the troubleshooting process, it often makes sense to attempt booting a machine in Safe Mode by holding down the shift key immediately after pressing the power button. By holding this down until the gray apple with spinning gear appears, many computers that wouldn’t boot will magically start right up. Many things happen…

By Jon, jon@smalldog.com I’ve been deep into every generation iMac, and a few weeks ago we discussed the replacement of the rear housing on a new iMac following damage in transit. This week, the unit had no physical damage–just an aluminum iMac that failed to power on reliably. The iMac was received and the listed…

Written by Ryan, ryan@smalldog.com. Ryan is an Apple certified tech in our Waitsfield Store! He writes: A customer brought in her 14” iBook G4 this week because it was having “video issues.” The internal display was very garbled, but when hooked up to an external monitor, the external showed a perfectly clear picture. Because the…

by Matt, matt@smalldog.com A customer came in early last week reporting that his 24” iMac was locking up completely while playing World of Warcraft. I ran all the diagnostics I have available to me, used the machine in real-world situations, and even “artificially” stress-tested it by running iTunes visualizer for the graphics card, copying a…