I picked up my MacBook Pro from the repair today, but I’m not sure it’s fully fixed. The original problem seems to be gone; the screen back light is working now. However in my test run this evening I’ve had my laptop freeze up once and reboot twice for no apparent reason. I haven’t a clue why it would be doing this, so I’m worried it might be a hardware short. It could possibly be overheating but I’ve had it act weird soon after bootup when I’m not doing that much.

I’m debating whether it’s worth testing it some more and possibly risking further damage, or just contacting the techs again tomorrow morning.

To my annoyance, it looks like there’s a fair chance I’ll be without my MacBook Pro over the Christmas break, which means I won’t have my digital research notes and won’t be able to work on Flash games until next year. Grrr.

I checked my MacBook Pro into the local Mac store for servicing. Taking into account the shipping time to the repair shop and waiting for parts and labour I reckon it might be away for a week. I could have shaved off a day or two by taking it to the repair shop myself, but I’m feeling mildly unwell today and don’t fancy driving to a place I’ve never been to while my head is swimming.

It’s a royal pain to not have my laptop for a week, as nearly all my work and hobbies either depend on it or work better with it. My note-taking software is all Mac OS only, and so is my Adobe Creative Suite. I’m considering getting an iMac in the New Year so I can have a Mac compatible desktop as well, but for now I’m back to my old tools. At least I don’t need much more than a text editor for writing documents, and I’m still happier using Inkscape than Illustrator so I can spend some time working on vector art. I haven’t been using my WinAMD desktop (what is the AMD equivalent of Wintel, anyway?) for more than a DVD player for a while, so I might be a bit rusty on things. I seem to have gotten used to having the menu at the top of the screen for starters.

Incidentally, while the Mac keyboard I bought for the weekend was expensive I found it really nice to type on. It might be because I haven’t tried many keyboard styles other than the standard ten year old model I’ve been using for my PCs since I started buying them, but the thin line keys work rather well. I can get a really zippy typing speed using it which I can’t match on my old Windows keyboard right now.

Now I’d better see what I can salvage from my backups off my laptop and see if I can get some work done today on this old thing.

It seems my MacBook Pro screen is going to have to be repaired again. This morning as I was checking my email I got up to get a cup of coffee, and when I headed back the backlight in my laptop monitor had gone. I’m not sure if it’s a software problem or the backlight is blown, but I’m probably going to be spending a significant chunk of next week trying to fix it - which isn’t time I can really afford. I really need my laptop at the moment as it’s got all my research notes on it. I have backups of my thesis draft all over the place but I’ve been entering my notes last week into VoodooPad, and it’d be a real pain to have to re-enter them. Not to mention it’s annoying not having a mobile computer.

For now, I headed into the local Apple store to check the problem and will be back on Monday when their resident tech expert is in. I’ve bought myself a Mac keyboard so I can use my laptop like a desktop over the weekend. Although the Apple keyboards are a bit overpriced by my tastes it’s handy to have a spare Mac keyboard around, particularly if I get myself an iMac sometime soon.

In another act of negative karma, I found a parcel from Amazon as I was heading out to the car to go to the Apple store. Due to my general cluelessness I managed to drive off with the parcel on the roof of my car. It managed to stay there for about a kilometre or two before falling off; thankfully I heard it drop and saw it in the rear vision mirror. No harm ultimately done except for my pride.

The books themselves were for cartooning, in particular on writing. One of them is a specific writing book: Make Your Words Work by Gary Provost. I realised I didn’t have many general writing books, which is a hole in my library when I’m writing up a thesis and occasionally other things. The other is a specific cartooning book: The Everything Cartooning Book by Brad J. Guigar, which I had recommended to me as a good general purpose book for comic strip creation (as opposed to comic books or manga).

I’m hoping that the problem with my laptop can be fixed swiftly so I can keep using my MacBook Pro. I’ve built up a nice collection of software over the last few months that I need a Mac for, and it’s going to be a real pain for nearly everything I do not to have it.