Zeke

What is Zeke? Zeke is my MacBook Pro, which has undergone countless revisions. The following is the tale describing how I came to meet Zeke (and Fiona along the way).

I bought my first MacBook Pro in 2009 and it was the largest expense I had ever made my young life. I thoroughly enjoyed it until it started acting up (~6 months later) and the trackpad wouldn’t respond. I also noticed that there was a screen defect, so I brought my MacBook Pro into Apple (after, of course, doing everything in my power not to bring in).

Apple informed me that I have to leave my computer with them for a week to get repaired, so I, sadly, parted with my computer. When I came back the following week,
I found that the problem was not fixed in the traditional way. When I came back to the store I asked to try out my computer before signing any paperwork, I tried out the trackpad and found that it was working beautifully, but I noticed that the screen defect was flipped over the y-axis (meaning that they tried to fix the screen by taking it off, flipping it, and putting it back on). When I alerted them of this problem, they gave me new computer. Luckily, I recently purchased a new hard drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my Snow Leopard installation from one disk to another, so when I got home, I just installed the cloned drive. After some playing around, I found that my computer was working beautifully and that was the birth of Fiona a.k.a. MacBook Pro 2.0.

After installing Mac OS X Lion, I found that my computer was running abnormally slow. I called Apple asking for some tips to speed it up, and I found that those tips worked, but it still wasn’t up to the speed at which I believed was optimum.

I had to install Windows 7 on my Mac using Boot Camp for school and Visual Studios along with it and I found that my Mac partition would no longer boot (after installing Visual Studios); it was terrible. After rescuing my Mac from Catastrophic Operating System Failure 5 times, I discovered that Visual Studios was partially installing on my Mac partition. I had to perform data recovery. I was told that my hard drive was probably dead or dying by Apple tech, but I refused to believe it and found that I was right and they were wrong. A couple months later, I found that my computer is running slow again. So, I was trying to optimize it by running some tests in Windows, but I found that Windows wasn’t booting consistently (sometimes it would boot sometimes it wouldn’t). To me this started seem like the beginnings of hard drive failure. I worked with Apple techs on the phone for over 5 hours (total time) before we discovered that the hard drive was the most likely candidate. I purchased a new hard drive, a 750 GB Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM Solid-State Hybrid Drive.

2 months prior to me purchasing this new hard drive, I installed 8 GB of RAM hopefully’s to speed up my computer and it worked. So one could imagine my surprise when I found that it started to slow again. I called Apple support (again) to deal with the slowing of my computer. While doing some standard tests and resets, I experienced another instance of Catastrophic Operating System Failure. I went about trying to repair everything, which turned into me trying to restore everything (after I had to delete the OS to get my drive working again). My Mac is full of surprises and irrationality. The next thing shouldn’t have surprised me but it did; when trying to restore, I found that my Time Machine backups would not transfer to the new hard drive. For me to determine that this was a hard drive problem and not a backup problem, I had to delete the partition on my Mac, partition once again, install the operating system, and migrate my 400+ GB of data 4 times (1.6 TB). Coincidently, my data when transferring to the new hard drive until it randomly succeeded (making the total data transfer size 2 TB). This random success was just that, random.

So there are a couple things for you to take out of this, which I learned. If you’re having problems with Lion, like there are still problems after reinstalling, there is a small chance that you could have a corrupt version of Lion in your recovery partition (there are, of course more variables than just OS problems). Another thing I learned: it is very important to back up in more than one place (we will soon be discussing useful forms of backing up, but that’s for a different article).

So I did leave a lot out of the story (sorry, I’m not the best story teller), but here’s the summary: the problems stemming with Mac (or my Mac at least) manifest themselves randomly. If you are lucky, like me, to get every single computer problem possible, it is very important to think through even the most ridiculous and absurd of cases. If you do not, no one will be able to help you because, frankly, the Apple techs aren’t trained for those obscure cases (some might be, but most aren’t).

So Zeke has some of the following specs:
2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
750 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus XT Solid-State Hybrid Drive
8 GB 1067 MHz DDR 3 RAM
Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2

So, here is a video showing the speed of Zeke now.

Also, if you need any help with your computer problems, let me know at NeedZach.com.

Zeke:

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