If your Mac laptop isn’t staying charged as long as it used to or won’t hold a charge at all, it may be time to consider replacing the battery. When you click the battery icon on the top right of your desktop, you may see these warnings to service the battery or replace now: The life of your Macbook Pro battery is measured in cycle counts. One cycle count is using all of your battery’s power fully. You could use 75% of the battery one day, recharge it to 100% and then use 25% the next day. This would count…
iMac Graphics Card GPU Overheating and Failure
There is a common flaw in the all-in-one iMac design. Due to internal space constraints, many iMacs develop an overheating graphics card issue that results in a black/blue/grey screen while the computer is powered on or a screen that shows vertical stripes or columns. Early symptoms are an iMac that fails to wake up from sleep or one that wakes up but only shows a black screen. In the iMac heat is transferred from the graphics card chipset via copper pipes. The copper pipes then transfer heat to the silver cooling fins and out the backside of the iMac through…
Mac Repair for Minnesotans… and International Travelers
Throughout the years I have had the pleasure of helping many different customers with their Mac repair needs. Most have been local customers here in Minnesota, while others have been traveling from around the world. I have helped clients visiting Minnesota from Norway, Sweden, Finland, China and Israel. It’s always fun to see the variations in Mac computers from around the world. Here are recent photos of a European model of the MacBook Pro. The keyboard layout is varied slightly. I’ve been able to coordinate both large and small repairs and upgrades for these clients. Some have had the misfortune…
Trackpad Won’t Click on your MacBook or MacBook Pro?
Trackpad won’t click? Does your MacBook’s trackpad look like these photos? Or even worse… It’s not a pretty sight. Your trackpad won’t click, can’t click, outright refuses to click! And you’re stuck. This is an issue I’ve worked on again and again. The culprit is not always obvious, especially when the problem first starts. The troublemaker is often no other than your battery. As your Mac laptop ages, the battery can degrade. The cells within the battery can begin to expand. One these unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, the battery is located beneath the trackpad, and as it expands it pushes up against the…
Jon’s Music Studio
One of the best perks for doing my kind of work is the many creative people I get to meet. Jon Erickson, owner of Ultimate Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning is a prime example. Besides running his successful business, Jon spends most of his free time with family and pursue his passion of music production. His MacBook Pro was in need of an upgrade to make use of Logic Pro X and Jon hired me for the job. We put a 240GB SSD (solid state hard drive) and 8GB of RAM in his laptop. We then updated the software to Mac…
Dead Hard Drive Caused by Overheating due to Dirty iMac Innards
A couple weeks ago I got a call to assist with an Apple iMac desktop that failed to boot into Mac OS X. A quick assessment over the phone gave me enough information to know it’s likely a dead hard drive issue which prevents the iMac from booting and stuck at the flashing question mark folder screen. I took the iMac home attempting to retrieve the data on it and to replace the dead hard drive with a new one. It’s worth mentioning this iMac was not even two years old – it is very unusual for a hard drive to die in such short…
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