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All my computers: dead 
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This could go in and of the the What's on Your Mind/Rant/Tales of Fail threads. I couldn't choose, so I started one.

Last week both the computers I am like,y to use for work died. My MacBook Pro died on Tuesday. Judging you the beeps, it's RAM. The following day,my he HD in my Mac Mnini gave up. I was planning to upgrade it over the Easter break, but it decided that I should bring that coward a bit.

This left me with nothing to work on on Wednesday. I like to have two Macs - the laptop is a handy thing to take around with me, but I know that the Mini (my main working machine) gave up the ghost, I could move stuff fo m a backup to the MBP and carry on. It's a safety net, if you like. Not last week.

Thursday saw me getting a replacement HD. I had researched how to replace the drives, and while it's fiddly, it looked doable. The drive is buried beneath the WiFi antenna. Take that out, and it lifts out. The new one gets out in its pace. A bit of a fiddle, but it's doable. It certainly looked less of an issue than some of the Mac portables I have had to comepletely disassemble to change the HD. I also made sue I had the right screwdrivers, because some were ones that I don't have to hand here.

So, backup was restored from a TimeMachine drive. This took the rest of Thursday. This was done with a USB caddy, and network booting. This creates a bootable volume, so I left it to run.

Friday was the big day. Screwdrivers out, anti static wristband on, and instructions on th iPad for me to follow and off I went. All the bits I needed to get to the hard drive out came out. But I got stuck. the hard drive would not come out. It snagged on the RAM housing. I tried a few orientations, but Soave is very limited in those machines, and it just would not come out.

So I looked for deeper instructions - and there are some. The motherboard slides out, BUT you need a tool to slot into the board and pull. Now, depending on where you look, the motherboard is either held in with clips OR glue. However, it seems that some force is needed to remove it. I decided that I was not doing that. I knew that I could break the thing, and that would suddenly make the whole thing much more expensive.

So I phoned my local Apple service store. I need the old HD take out and the new one out in. Can they do this? Long story short: no. It was too old - Apple would not sanction this repair. Tbis is a late 2012 Mini, the range was last updated in 2014. Old means one generation away from the current line. They did give me the name of a company that could do it.

So, today I took the Mini to somewhere in deepest Essex, and, in a few hours, it was done. They said that the Mac Mini is a real sod of a computer to work on, but it's a nice machine to have. It seems that it's been designed for assembly, not disassembly. It cost me £45 for the work, much less than a new Mac mini would be if I had broken it.

Meanwhile, Simon (Saspro) has kindly sent me some RAM sticks to test in the MacBook Pro. If it boots with those, I can replace what I already have when funds have built up a bit. I'll be doing this when I know I have caught up with work.

It has been a hell of a week. I feel better now the Mini is back, and running (it's doing some housekeeping right now). But this does mean that I will be able to test and catch up tomorrow, and pick up where I left off.

It has been a difficult few days. My experience of a taking Macs to bits has been thwarted by this event, and I have questioned my judgement at arriving at strategy. Should I have attempted a repair? It's almost been a crisis of confidence for me.

I can start to relax now. In fact I am feeling it now - manifesting itself in headaches and real fatigue.

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Mon Mar 26, 2018 7:39 pm
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Hmm, of the various criticisms levels at Macs these days the complexity of repair/replacement is certainly the most valid IMHO.
I can sort of see the justification for making them like an appliance that 'just works' but most appliances are a damn sight cheaper and easier to replace if they go wrong.
The last Mac I worked on was a MacPro (2008 model) so getting to stuff was a doddle. I doubt I'd have the confidence to try much on many of the more recent models even with the right tools.
Even folks like iFixit find working on modern Macs a pain so I don't think you should feel too bad about the issues you encountered.

At least you managed to retrieve things at least partially and thank goodness you had a decent backup.

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Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:49 am
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but Soave is very limited in those machines


Well, there's your problem! There shouldn't be any wine in the Mac mini in the first place! :lol:

Glad things are getting back to normal and I hope the RAM from Saspro sorts out the problem, that is a cheap fix, compared to a new motherboard or new Mac... (I had to cope with a coffee saturated MBP last year, that was expensive - but the LCD display had some lovely patterns on it.

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Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:50 am
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Yeah I've heard about how difficult macs can be for upgrades unless it's the tower. Having said that, I imagine all ultra-small form factor pcs to be tricky to upgrade.

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Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:55 am
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cloaked_wolf wrote:
Yeah I've heard about how difficult macs can be for upgrades unless it's the tower. Having said that, I imagine all ultra-small form factor pcs to be tricky to upgrade.

Microsoft's Surface products certainly appear to be as bad, if not worse, to get into and repair as their Apple equivalents (at least as far as iFixit teardowns appear to be concerned).

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Tue Mar 27, 2018 11:36 am
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Well, it’s running, and clearly the new HD has given it some of it’s *snap* back. That’s good.

Both Dropbox and Backblaze had problems with the new HD - they both saw it as a new component and a possible security issue. I had a re-register DropBox, and re-install BackBlaze and migrate my account to the new machine. DropBox just reindexed everything, and BackBlaze is doing some housekeeping backups/comparing at the moment it seems. There’s a lot of files for it to get through.

The good news is that it seems to be OK - apart from the odd re-entry of passwords, the TimeMachine backup restore seems to have been pretty much OK.

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Tue Mar 27, 2018 11:40 am
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Sadly, Mac Pom Pro has not responded well to the RAM tests same problem, so it's probably in the realm of uneconomic repair.....

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Last edited by paulzolo on Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:42 am, edited 1 time in total.



Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:35 am
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paulzolo wrote:
Sadly, Mac Pom Promhas not responded well to the RAM tests same problem, so it's probably in the realm of uneconomic repair.....

Yeah, that sounds kind of fatal and expensive.

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Mon Apr 02, 2018 11:33 am
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davrosG5 wrote:
paulzolo wrote:
Sadly, Mac Pom Promhas not responded well to the RAM tests same problem, so it's probably in the realm of uneconomic repair.....

Yeah, that sounds kind of fatal and expensive.


There was one hope that I found and tried - someone on ifixit.com said that their RAM wasn’t being held in snug;y enough, and a small shim in the RAM bay may be enough to make the clips hold in cards in a little more tightly. I tried this, and no change in the situation. It would have been funny if the problem was something I last encountered with a ZX81! Oh, well.

If I can find nothing else (I may contact the people who fitted the Mini’s HD to see if they have any ideas), I’ll harvest the hard drive and the screen (may be able to find a controller for that and run ye olde BBC and Spectrums from it) and junk the rest.

What a shame. It was a nice machine to use, and the screen was excellent.

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Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:45 am
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Thinking about it. My older MBP (same vintage as yours) beeped a few times before getting a grey screen & suffered the GPU failure that the 2011 model was famous for.

I got a new GPU soldered to the board (with leaded solder) and the machine was perfect afterwards.

I think it was these guys I dealt with (the leaded solder is the important bit of the repair)

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Apple-Macboo ... xyNo9SxqJU

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Wed Apr 04, 2018 1:07 pm
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saspro wrote:
Thinking about it. My older MBP (same vintage as yours) beeped a few times before getting a grey screen & suffered the GPU failure that the 2011 model was famous for.

I got a new GPU soldered to the board (with leaded solder) and the machine was perfect afterwards.

I think it was these guys I dealt with (the leaded solder is the important bit of the repair)

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Apple-Macboo ... xyNo9SxqJU


Thanks. I’ll have a think about that - the price looks good considering the possible cost of a replacement. I may try emailing him to see what he thinks the problem could be and what (if anything) he can do to fix it. It could certainly do with a bit of diagnostic investigation before I write it off.

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Wed Apr 04, 2018 2:22 pm
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