Category: 645: Mac Damage, Adjusting Your Trackpad, iChat Screen Real Estate, $599 MacBooks

Want a 17″ MacBook Pro, but don’t need all the features of the new unibody model released last week? Or, more likely, want some of the features of the older 17″ MacBook Pro that aren’t available in the new model – such as removable battery, traditional DVI and FireWire 400 ports? If so, we picked…

Originally written by Art, “art@smalldog.com”:mailto:art@smalldog.com The Small Dog iMac refurb. project continues here in Waitsfield. Now that I have touched every part inside of one of those machines, I can say that they are designed quite well. Apple’s design team did not want customers to be able to take them apart on a whim, but…

We recently took delivery of fifty white first-generation MacBooks. I’ve been refurbishing them myself these past few days, as the technicians in South Burlington and Waitsfield are experiencing some extraordinary volume right now. They came to us with some stickers identifying their former owners, so that has to be stripped away. I’ve found that denatured…

The newest Apple laptops feature a glass trackpad that supports many useful gestures. Made of glass, it feels great and the whole trackpad is the trackpad button. You can press in certain areas to accomplish simple tasks like right-clicking, and the supported gestures are, I’m sure, only a precursor of what’s to come. I received…

We see a ton of damaged computers in the service department. It seems more common in our South Burlington tech room, as it’s right down the street from the University of Vermont and, well, it’s a college town. There are two primary types of physical damage: liquid spills and impact damage. Liquid spills often mean…

Happy Tuesday, After a week at Macworld making connections, sourcing parts, and attending meetings on every possible service-related topic, it’s great to be home. It’s always weird being away from the dogs. In the office, it seems one is always either at my feet, in my lap, or jumping on me; we wouldn’t have it…