Here's the fan up close and impersonal
One of the joys of running your own business is operating on a tight budget, and that means using your equipment for a long time and even fixing things yourself when they break down.
So while your corporate buddies are enjoying champagne brunch at the Royal Meridien, you may find yourself replacing the right cooling fan on your MacBook Pro. Like me. Like today.
My four-year old MacBook Pro had been sounding a bit like an F-16 that had just been through a rough skirmish lately, which told me that it was time to replace one of the cooling fans. These tiny little turbos do a good job of dissipating the heat from the processor and other guts of the laptop, but they do have a limited number of spins in their lifespan, and the rattling sounds coming from mine let me know that it was time for some surgery.
While I am something of a tech guy these days, my job description usually does not include hardware repair. Still I was able to take the machine apart, replace the fan, and put it back together in an hour and a half. Here’s what helped.
- Ordered a replacement fan from PowerBookMedic.com. (Make sure to get the correct one for your machine).
- Followed the step-by-step illustrated guide on iFixit.com. This site was invaluable for showing how to take things apart in the proper order without breaking the fragile innards of my Mac.
So next month I plan to use iFixit again to install a solid-state hard drive into my MacBook Pro so that it runs longer on a charge and holds more data, and to upgrade the RAM so that I can run more apps at once and make the machine run a bit faster.
So it wasn’t a fun Sunday so far, but it was a productive one. And I didn’t have to stand in line at the Genius Counter at the Apple Store.
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