November Twenty

My MacBook is going to New York!

Without any technical data available, I have not been able to proceed beyond getting the battery to charge. Now whenever I push the power button to on, the unit turn's on briefly, I can hear the CD/DVD drive powers up for a short time, and then it immediately self shutdown. There is something wrong with the POST (power on self test, a process that most computer goes through before attempting to boot up) in that it detected an anomaly, and thus for self preservation it cuts down the power flow and shuts down. If POST was successful, the Mac then produced that familiar "boing sound" and proceed to the next step of finding a boot source such as the CD/DVD or hard drive. I wish I know which part of the self test sequence this POST is doing, so I can correct that condition, but no dice. Scouring the internet produced no result. Interestingly, while doing so I found an Apple document that I am familiar with. Many years ago, when Apple was a young company they used to produce technical documents for their hardware and software. One of them is called Service Source. This is a document that describe how to trouble shoot a Mac computer, and how to take it apart. This in itself is not a big deal nowadays as one website called ifixit.com often times have many take apart procedures available for most Apple products as web pages or downloadable PDF file, along with color photographs. Service Source however, is not readily available, and usually only certified Apple technicians have access to it. I found a copy for the MacBook Pro, but alas, none for my MacBook. In any case though, when I followed the Service Source trouble shooting procedure, it points to replacing the Logic Board. This is a 700-800 dollar item from Apple, and I am not willing to spend that much money. On eBay or ifixit, they are going for about 400-500, still way too much for me. So I am going to a last resort for now: I found a fella on eBay who claimed a 90% success rate in curing MacBooks with the above symptom. He claimed that if he can't fix it, there will be no charge except for the cost of shipping it back to me. Otherwise, he'll charge 200 dollars.

I am going to give him a try. His eBay feedback is 97% positive, so I am fairly confident that he is going to be ok. That's it for now.