Lately, Eve (my 15″ MacBook Pro) has been showing her age a bit more than I’m comfortable with.
A few weeks ago, she suddenly became unresponsive, as in no applications would launch, and finder froze. She complained that spotlight had quit unexpectedly, and at other times (the problem persisted after a reboot) she added more serious things too, like the loginwindow (which is supposed to always be running in the background), and even more seriously, the systemuiserver (which manages the entire visible interface of the computer). After some personal messing around (ensuring that I had all of my files backed up-thank god for Time Machine), I brought her into the Apple Store.
The Geniuses tried re-installing the OS from an external hard drive (as my superdrive had been broken for more than a year), and it repeatedly failed. This led them to the conclusion that Eve’s hard drive was corrupted. Seeing as how she is almost 3 years old, and that’s about the average life of a hard drive, it seemed likely….However, they said that it was highly unlikely that they’d be able to repair it themselves due to the computer’s cosmetic damage (dents and such, particularly one directly under the hard drive, not to mention a huge crack across the base of the frame of the display). Instead, they sent me to a little place in Allston called The Computer Loft, who agreed to replace/upgrade the hard drive and the superdrive for around $600.
Well, they did an amazing job – Eve’s hard drive is now a 7200rpm, 320gb drive, which is absolutely amazing, and I finally have a working superdrive again, which is nice. However, two days ago Eve’s right-hand started acting up.
I noticed that she was making a pretty loud buzzing noise, with a relatively light load, so I checked the fan speeds – as I thought, the left fan was going at about 5000rpm, and the right fan was spinning at around 2400rpm. This itself was abnormal, since I have the fans set to always spin in synchronization, but even more abnormal was the buzzing noise – a fan spinning at 2400rpm should be relatively quiet. I put her to sleep, and woke her up again – the buzzing was entirely gone. I was happy, but that didn’t last long, because I realized that the buzzing had only stopped because the fan had, as well. That was two days ago, and my right fan hasn’t risen above 0rpm since.
As a result, Eve is running a bit hotter than normal, but the left fan is working in overtime to keep the temperature regulated. Meanwhile, I’m trying to avoid heavy loads (opeations which would normally push both fans to their maximum) for fear of overheating her. I suppose I’m going to have to bring her back into The Computer Loft. I’m not really ready to buy a new computer yet, but Eve is starting to fall apart…
That is quite troublesome. I’m using a really old laptop, but hey, it still runs, even if the hard drive is slow as hell and it freezes on me. So we’re kind of in a similar situation… Kind of.
Only a little bit longer and I get my old desktop back.