Monday, July 4, 2011

The Beast


If you didn't know yet, I like to call my MacBook Pro "The Beast". This thing can devour data like you've never seen and turn it into polished gold.

Yesterday I took The Beast to Primary to show the video I made for I Love To See The Temple. Everything was going fine. Took it home, checked my Facebook and email before shutting the lid and putting it into sleep mode for some much deserved rest.

Last night I came back to the computer, but when I opened the lid, the desktop didn't come back on. I checked everything, but nothing was working. I held the power button down and hard booted the computer. It tried to start but couldn't get past the indicator lights turning on before it shut down again.

After using the "pull the battery out to reset" trick, it still was giving the same problem. Thankfully, I have my HP Windows laptop, so I pulled it out and went to the site for my local Apple Store and made an appointment with a genius.

I went today, and found out it was the power supply card that regulates the power to the machine. I've seen these go out before, and they are fixable, but I was worried that since I purchased my laptop in 2008 they wouldn't fix it. I looked online, and with my educator discount it would still cost me $2500 to buy a new laptop, and it wouldn't have the features I've enjoyed with this one.

Thankfully, they can fix it and they are. It's no longer under warranty, so it will cost me between $300 to $1,100 to fix, but it's still better than having to spend $2500 to buy a new laptop and the amount of time it would take for me to re-install all of the software.

Now if you're wondering why I'm not freaked out about losing the stuff on the laptop?

It's because I bought and use a Time Capsule in my home. It not only handles the wi-fi in my home, but also has an external hard drive that does automatic backups of my laptop. Since I didn't do much work on it on Sunday, there isn't much that would have been lost if I had to replace The Beast.

But, all in all, I'm so thankful that I will be getting The Beast fixed and it will hopefully last a while longer to continue to devour more information. In the meantime, the PowerPoint I was going to make is going to have to wait until I get the laptop back. Hopefully it should only take a few days.

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