I have come to appreciate the Apple Macbook Pro as one of the finest notebook computers I have ever used. I currently have a 2012 model that I run both OSX Mountain Lion along with Windows 7 Pro. From the fit and finish to the solid aluminum unibody construction, great backlit keyboard and excellent track pad the machine is top notch running Mac or Windows. That being said as with any machine they require maintenance and care and occasional repair. At our repair center Computer Doctor of Hampden we deal with both Mac and PC issues everyday. From liquid spills to broken screens, software glitches and hard drive repairs we see it all. First and foremost your Macbook Pro is hydrophobic! It does not like water, beer, wine, soda,coffee, tea, milk, dog urine or pickle juice and yes I have worked on all those scenarios! The adage an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure rings true even more with the base price for a Macbook pro @ the $1200 mark. Life can be hectic, you can bring your portable Mac so many places, think about the risks you run, from loss of the system, data corruption and at least a loss of productivity and repair costs.
Broken Macbook Pro Computer Doctor of Hampden Apple Repair
What is your back up plan? OSX has a very simple back up plan that can aid in both data and system recovery for the price of an external usb drive you can have peace of mind and the ability to find deleted files as well as recovering from a crashed hard drive . Please follow the instruction on Apples website to set up your back up plan sooner than later, consider it insurance for your digital life. Need help getting started? We stock external hard drives and can configure your back up plan as well as optimize your Mac for top performance and check for potential problems.
Given routine maintenance, reasonable care and proper usage your Macbook Pro can give you years of faithful service. Feel free to contact us with questions or submit a service request now.
Every year people line up at an obscene time of day to save a few dollars on whatever they need or want and to burn off a few calories after the Thanksgiving feast.
Often the door buster deals are the cheapest computer you can imagine, special models are sometimes put together just for these blow out events. Here at Computer Doctor of Hampden, we see these computer come in all year round, you may be lucky and have one fail during warranty but more often then not they fail catastrophically shortly after the warranty expires. Now some people look at computers and laptops as throw away devices, buy cheap and get a new one when it dies. That is great as long as you have an excellent back up plan, I recommend a combination of local and cloud based back up plans.
For those that plan on keeping their computers for a few years here are some suggestions, avoid the cheapest of the cheap, avoid Acer,Gateway, HP and Compaq laptops that you are paying under $400 for. We have a pile of these failed computers and laptops, we are seeing both motherboard and hard drive failures increasing as prices decrease. Cheap hard drives and poor cooling systems are a recipe for failure. If you do find yourself drawn in to these cheap computers, try to get one with an intel processor, they tend to run a bit cooler and make an investment in a cooling pad, for ~$20 you can help extend the life of your bargain basement laptop.
With prices dropping for desktops and laptops and increasing demand for more disc space for our expanding digital media ecosystem, one glaring side effect is the increase in hard drive failures.
In our computer service center, we see the results everyday. My explanation to customers is hard drives may go out with whimper or a bang. A whimpering drive may display symptoms like, slow boot times, freeze ups, diminished performance and unexplained shut downs. The bang is rather self explanatory. Upon start up you PC or Mac will not get very far before telling you the drive cannot be found or mounted.
Unlike most of the components of a computer, hard drives are mechanical devices with moving parts that wear out or break over time. They are also very susceptible to shock, such as if you drop or significantly jar a running computer.
While shock damage can happen at any time, mechanical failures are more likely in the first few months, as manufacturing flaws show up. The good thing about that situation is that the computer manufacturer’s warranty is in effect. Mechanical failures however can happen at any time. As the drive ages the bearing that the spindle rides on become a key point of failure, while ball bearings have been phased out since ~2006 the new fluid dampened design is also prone to failure over time as the fluid even though sealed loses it’s viscosity. This is also a concern for temperature variations. If you leave your laptop in freezing conditions over night the hard drive fluid chills and thickens much like motor oil does. If not allowed to warm up the increased resistance can lead to immediate failure or weaken the drive and hasten it’s demise.
Power surges, either from lightning or a faulty power supply, can damage electronic components, both on the external circuit board and in the internal amplifier circuits. The failure may then show up either immediately or several weeks later. While laptop power adapters and the better quality desktop power supplies include some surge protection, we advise you always use a surge protector with your computer.
We also advise you to always use good quality power supplies and power adapters. For many years now we have warned against very cheap desktop power supplies, which have high failure rates, and which when they fail can allow a surge of high voltage to reach your computer. The same applies to some of the cheap laptop power adapters which you can find on sale on the internet, or even (at much higher prices) in many well-known chain stores.
Finally, heat kills hard drives, or at lest greatly increases the failure rate – their operating temperature should not exceed 50°C (about 120°F). Many laptop computers get far too hot (due to poor cooling systems and design or components, such as some nVidia graphics chips, that produce excessive heat) and this heat can be fatal for your hard drives. Our advice is to always try and use your portable computer on a hard, flat surface. On most models the cooling fan pulls in air from the bottom, if this port is blocked temperatures rise quickly.
One way to think about your hard drive health is this, if you own a car and think it will last forever and never have it looked at and it fails, well go buy another car. However with a hard drive if you ignore the signs or do not take action as the computer ages to check the health of your drive, without proper back up you run the risk of either losing your data or if you are lucky, paying for a data recovery.
When you find yourself in a situation where your hard drive is showing symptoms or for peace of mind if your system is over 3-4 years in age feel free to contact us and we can do a comprehensive hardware analysis for your system and review your back up plan for the inevitable epic fail of your hard drive.
We also specialize in PC/MAC data recovery. Please! Back up now!
I love my iMac, It is a finely crafted piece of aluminum that greets me everyday with a beautiful bright glow and serves me well, even when I force it to run windows on occasion. For many it is the central hub of their home and/or professional computing universe. If you are not backing up your system with Time Machine you are really playing with fire. For the cost of a cheap terabyte external drive (usually less than $100) you can recover from the inevitable hard drive crash, quickly and with less expense.
For those that like to throw caution to the wind let me paint an all too familiar scenario. “Good afternoon Computer Doctor, how can I help you? Oh hi, I have a problem with my mac, for the last couple months it has been really slowing down, updates don’t work and every once in awhile it freezes up, this morning it won’t start at all. All I see is a grey screen with a folder with a question mark. In response I ask if they have a back up. No, I have been meaning to get one of those, I really should one of these days.
From there it can go from bad to worse quickly. Replacing the hard drive on an iMac requires removing that glorious screen and digging deep into the heart of the system, this in itself is not for the faint of heart… Once replaced if there was a back up, the system could be restored to the last place in time where it was functioning correctly and all your pictures, movies, iTunes documents will be right back where you left them.
Without a backup, What can happen if your lucky, is a piecemeal recovery which can be very time consuming, followed by a new installation of OSX and then all your apps. That is if the drive is intact enough to extract data. If it isn’t there are techniques to coax the data out and some very expensive recovery solutions that require a clean room and a pocket full of cash.
If you are in the greater Bangor, Hampden region and are experiencing crashes, freeze ups, shut downs, grey screens and the “spinning beach ball of death” Call or email me @ Computer Doctor of Hampden, sooner than later and we can get your beloved iMac back in great shape. If it is running fine, please stop on the way home and pick up an external drive. You will thank me later!
Let’s face it, the data on our computers for most of us is much more valuable than the computer itself. At my business Computer Doctor of Hampden we do data recovery on a daily basis. There are many possible points of data corruption, the ones I see most frequently in order of frequency are:
Deletion/corruption secondary to computer virus infections.
Logical corruption of data from a failing hard drive.
Mechanical hard drive failure.
User error, either deleting or formatting files or partitions.
Raid 0 failure, either disc or controller.
There are some high performance machines designed usually for gaming that are configured as Raid 0. This gives excellent performance as the data is spread across two drives and can access the information sequentially from each drive. When you fetch the first bit from drive “A”, drive “B” is right there with the next bit. Sounds like a great idea and in some situations it is. The biggest issue I have seen is not knowing that if either drive fails or the controller that keeps everything in check dies then we have a real problem. There is no redundancy and with the data spread across two drives, file recovery is a very difficult task involving specialized hardware and software.
In my recent raid 0 data recoveries the owners of the computers had no prior knowledge of the raid 0 configuration or its pitfalls. They were not using the systems for gaming at all, but had gigabytes of pictures, music and movies that were not backed up.
My advice is know your system, back up your files preferably both locally and to an off site location and remember every hard drive will fail, its just a matter of time…
Here is a breakdown of the most popular raid configurations, If you find yourself in need of configuring a system to utilize the redundancy/ performance gains possible or if you need your data recovered please contact us.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Independent) Disks.
On most situations you will be using one of the following four levels of RAIDs.
RAID 0
RAID 1
RAID 5
RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0)
This article explains the main difference between these raid levels along with an easy to understand diagram.
In all the diagrams mentioned below:
A, B, C, D, E and F – represents blocks
p1, p2, and p3 – represents parity
RAID LEVEL 0
Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 0.
Minimum 2 disks.
Excellent performance ( as blocks are striped ).
No redundancy ( no mirror, no parity ).
Don’t use this for any critical system.
RAID LEVEL 1
Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 1.
Minimum 2 disks.
Good performance ( no striping. no parity ).
Excellent redundancy ( as blocks are mirrored ).
RAID LEVEL 5
Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 5.
Minimum 3 disks.
Good performance ( as blocks are striped ).
Good redundancy ( distributed parity ).
Best cost effective option providing both performance and redundancy. Use this for DB that is heavily read oriented. Write operations will be slow.
RAID LEVEL 10
Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 10.
Minimum 4 disks.
This is also called as “stripe of mirrors”
Excellent redundancy ( as blocks are mirrored )
Excellent performance ( as blocks are striped )
If you can afford the dollar, this is the BEST option for any mission critical applications (especially databases).
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Following are the key points to remember for RAID level 1.
