Macbook Pro Charging/ Randomly Dying Issues

[udo]

I bought this Macbook Pro about a year and a half ago, with no apple care. Several months ago it began having an issue where it would sporadically say ‘not charging’ regardless of how much charge the battery had. I tried a good battery and charger, ran utilities, and reset the power management thing several times, nothing helped. The battery still charged, just extremely slowly, and it still said ‘not charging’ and the magsafe remained green.

A few weeks ago I installed a new harddrive (which didn’t solve the charging issue) but there weren’t any other abnormalities. About a week ago my computer started dying randomly, at first whenever it was moved even slightly, and thereafter would die randomly and unprovoked.

Then the new hard drive seemed to go bad, in that it would run for about thirty seconds and then spin for a minute or two down, so that, if you are transferring a file it would transfer in small intervals and take forever, also, the system would freeze every time it spun down. I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the system, but even during the installation process it would do the same thing.

I reinstalled the original hard drive which had been unaltered since its removal. It had power, but the system did not recognize it at all, except for one interval of about a minute where it briefly appeared then went away again.

To be safe I sent the new hard drive back for a replacement and I ordered a new flex cable. I am currently running my system off an external usb hard drive. It is working normally, but the computer still dies at random intervals.

I’m not sure if these problems are related. I know it isn’t battery, power supply, or software related. I tend to think it all stems from some power issue. I’m not sure if its the I/O board, some cable, or the Logic Board. I don’t want to keep spending money on parts that don’t need replaced, especially if the problem is ultimately the Logic Board.

Sorry that was kind of long, but I’m having a lot of problems Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[blodwyn]

Are you sure you tried a good replacement battery? I had all sorts of wacky charging issues when my MBP battery went bad.

Apart from that, a trip to a Genius bar would be a good plan if you have one in your area.

 

[udo]

The nearest Genius Bar is over an hour away. I'm going to try the new flex cable and hard drive, and if that doesn't work that will be where I'm going. Can you talk to them for free, if you are out of warranty? Can you pay them just to diagnose a problem?

 

[tolerance42]

I had a similar problem, but yours seems much more dire.

The genius bar will look at your laptop for free, and tell you what they think is wrong with it. But not everyone there is a "genius" if you get my drift.

From my experience, with all of those things going wrong, I would say that it could be the logic board, unfortunately. The battery not charging (or making the laptop die when you unplug it) would either point to the logic board, the DC-in board, or the battery cable (most likely the cable), but that plus your other problems, it very well could be the logic board. The genius bar will do something when there could be more than one cause, they'll do a flat-rate repair, but it still costs jut under 300 bucks. But normally, just the logic board from them costs over 500, so...

Just hope that I'm wrong, eh?

 

[udo]

update: I unplugged the hard drive from the logic board (the one that wasn't showing up anyway) and it seems to have fixed both the charging and dying issue (or at least it has so far)

I'm not exactly sure what this means, the new flex cable should be in here in a few days (im almost certain there is nothing wrong with the hard drive itself), i'll be able to confirm that when the enclosure gets here

before, any time I would press down on the left side of the top case (it isn't currently screwed on) it would die, but it doesn't after having unplugged the flex cable, its almost as if a short is being created somewhere, or something

so, if the new flex cable doesn't fix it, that tends to make me think its the logic board, maybe where the flex cable connects, or something, right?

 

[udo]

update again: There is, in fact, a minor rip in the flex cable, which explains the dying issue and the hard drive issue.

The charging is most likely unrelated, I think the battery is just bad. Do they still have the program where they will replace faulty batteries on computer less than two years old? It only has 50 cycles .

 

[blodwyn]

Nice troubleshooting. Apple have had a few battery replacement programs, depending on the year/model. This is something the Genius bar should be able to tell you for sure if you call them.