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Early '08 MBP failing. Finals approaching. Advice?

C

Chiefo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 27, 2008
13
0
Hello,
In April of '08, I bought a 15" MBP. Best purchase ever. It has served me well. In the last year or so, it has begun acting up...and in the last ~7 days the problems have multiplied.
I'm in the middle of professional school - and finals are coming up in about 2 weeks. As much as I don't WANT to purchase a new computer...I could likely free up sufficient funds to do so. Below are the symptoms. Maybe some people can weight in with advice?

(1) For the past ~6 months: Sometimes when I am typing, a key will act like it is "stuck" and keep repeating. However, the key isn't physically stuck, the keyboard is pretty clean, and it is several different keys (although typically "e," "y," the down arrow, and the delete button)
In the last few weeks, this has gotten worse.

(2) Sometimes when I open the clamshell, my monitor doesn't "light up." I'll just get a black screen, or a VERY dark screen where I can dimly make out a picture.
The new trick: Sometimes I will get backlighting on the screen, but it will be uneven. It will look like some areas of the screen are bright while others are dark. It almost looks like little spotlights projecting from the base of the screen.

(3) The last few days, I have had airport/wireless problems. Piggybacking on this, Safari has gone buggy on a few sites (such as Reddit). Today, I couldn't get it to connect to the internet for about 1/2 when I came home. All my other devices worked fine and the usual channels (restarting router, cycling aiport connection, zapping PRAM) have failed.


This leads me to three questions: (1) Has anyone seen these types of symptoms before? (2) Is it possible that my display problems are related to the NVIDIA recall - is it possible I could get a replacement here?

(3) With finals approaching...what is the likelihood I have a catastrophic hardware failure in the near future?

Thanks!

-Reg
 
Chiefo said:
This leads me to three questions: (1) Has anyone seen these types of symptoms before? (2) Is it possible that my display problems are related to the NVIDIA recall - is it possible I could get a replacement here?

(3) With finals approaching...what is the likelihood I have a catastrophic hardware failure in the near future?
Click to expand...

(1) not all of them. Just the wake up from sleep where the display stays mostly dark. The trick here usually is to hit the "darker" button first, then increase the brightness as usual. Also, I've had wireless problems already when I bought the machine. They disappeared maybe after two years with some OSX update.

(2) it's not impossible. You can run the self-check, my GPU gave some cryptic error reading there (failed 1/2 a year later). They exchange the logic board. Most likely they won't give you a new MBP.

(3) It's always possible to have a failure, even on a new system. Just keep backing up regularly (like, daily... use cloud, dropbox etc), and think about your backup plan (i.e. if you have access to a machine you could work on if your machine breaks).
 
Sounds to me like it might be time for a new machine. Might not be cost effective to fix an almost 4 year old Mac.

As others suggested get everything backed up just in case your current machine has a complete meltdown.
 
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