Fixing Macbook & MacbookPro computers

Pretty much every portable Apple computer I've owned has had a hard drive fail and the optical drives all go (normally a week outside of a year old!) - although they aren't hard to fix it does pay to have a walk through and this is where iFixit come in - they have guides for most machines and they carry the parts.

Before you start pulling current gen Mac laptops apart make sure you have the necessary drivers. Mine required the following (all in watchmaker sizes); pozi-drive, pentelobe, Torx and Trilobe.

Adeona - stolen laptop tracker

I installed Adeona on my MacBook Pro over a week ago and promptly forgot I had it on there - it consumes little processor time and you're unaware of it. What is does is continually send photos from the iSight camera and any useful info - IP, nearby DNS servers, router names etc - basically anything to help physically locate a stolen computer. Best of all it's open source and the OpenDHT storage it uploads to is 256-bit encrypted.

Fixing laptop keyboards

It's not really widely applicable but I got to the end of a busy weekend with only one computer left to fix! (last weekend was a four-PC weekend - at some point I'm going to have to start charging people!). My sister's laptop is a Compaq EVO150 and the fault was that one of the control keys is sticky - it's unusable because trying to type in Word when every keypress is CTRL-keypress is frustrating (to say the least). Anyhow - a replacement keyboard module is the best part of a hundred quid and a couple of weeks away - not ideal. The keyboard (like most laptop units) is a sealed unit and so flimsy that the thought of taking it apart was out of the question.

KeyTweak came to the rescue. It allows you to re-map scan codes and so isn't as useful as Microsoft's keyboard utility if you're using an unusual keyboard layout (for example). But, if you need to disable a key or make an unused key (like on those stupid multi-media keyboards) do something KeyTweak is the business. I just disables the right-hand control key and all was good. I had to detach the faulty module and use a USB keyboard while doing it, but it works like a charm - and who uses the right-hand control key?