MacBook Pro screen question...
 

I'm not familiar with MacBooks, but our son at university has one and the screen has gone out or there's a problem with it. It's a 13" MacBook Pro and five years old.

He took it to the Apple store and they said it was too old for them to fix. :rolleyes:

A third party repair shop said it was $400 to fix.

He's at school and I don't have access to it to fix (and I've never done it).

A replacement is $1000 with the student discount.

What do you think? Fix or get a new one?

Suggest a new one. If it is that old, chances are you will spend more $$ in the near future.

Get new one, then DIY the old one, use it as a spare or sell it.

^^

Listen to John

Boot it up, shine a really strong flashlight on it, if you can just make out text/graphics then it's the backlight.

If you see nothing then likely the inverter board which is a common issue.

~$30 USD off ebay.

Hook up an external monitor to test the the video card.

Jeez. Now my daughter has said her MacBook Pro isn't working either. It's three years old.

It's showing a white screen with a flashing grey folder icon with question mark.

She's not taken it to the apple store yet.

Any idea what that might be?

Not finding the startup disk.

Could be the OS got hosed or the hard drive died.

Pull out the OS CD it shipped with and boot from that or if the OS is current reboot and hold Command key + R key to reboot into the recovery partition.

You can buy a nice used one from reputable dealers on eBay. I paid $300 for mine and it's great. Yeah it had some scrapes on it but so what. Running Yosemite and all.

Thanks guys. I'm some what computer impaired, but we'll give the ideas a shot.

Targa: I'll take a look.

there is a place in Miami that I got mine from. Bought one for my wife as well. But there are a lot of resellers on the west coast as well..

A few year old MacBook pro is well worth repairing.

My wife has a 2011 (?) MBP. I put 16 GB RAM in it and it is a quick, snappy machine. Eventually I'll install an SSD.