On January 14, 2009 my wife and I had reservations on an early evening flight from PHL to LHR; we were on our way to Oxford for a six-month sabbatical (Joy doing research for a book at the Bodleian ; me working in a lab at “The Churchill” learning about interactions between malignant tumors and their hosts).
That morning, the high-end HP laptop provided by the hospital I work at died, 3 months past its 3y warranty. Slicing and dodging through meters of red tape in a half-hour, I rushed it over to the repair shop the hospital used. They phoned a couple of hours later (~1pm) to say that the northbridge was cracked; they had shimmed it with some folded electrical tape, but didn’t think it would last long. I scurried over, retrieved the HP, strode briskly to the university's computer store, and bought a late-2008 MacBook Pro. I phoned our computer guy from the store, trotted back to my office, and we spent a few hours shoveling software and data from the HP into the MBP. We finished, and I went home, took a shower, and we left for the airport. Since then the MBP has been my work computer, getting heavy use every day. Almost every evening I carried it home, worked on it, carried it back, put it in its docking station, and worked on it more. I upgraded the RAM, replaced the spinny drive with an SSD, and replaced the battery a few times. It was utterly faithful for 9 years and 10 months (almost 9 years past the end of its 1-year warranty). Before the MBP I’d had two top-of-the-line Toshiba laptops and two high-end HPs. All four snuffed it a few months after their 3-year warranties ended. This morning, the MBP would not start. The computer shop said that there was some old, slow corrosion on the motherboard, from some moisture entering through the row of ports on the right side at some point. That wasn’t surprising, since my commute is a 1 mile walk in all kinds of weather, carrying it in a backpack. So I bought a refurbished 2015 MBP, took the SSD out of the old one, and our computer guy and I will transfer the data Monday morning. Sigh. If anyone is interested, I have a late-2008 MBP battery in good condition, and will have a 450MP SSD available on Monday. Rick -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
