Laptop score, most likely.

[stomachmonkey]

There is a guy in my community who does PC repair on the side.

He knows zilch about Macs so whenever someone calls him he sends them to me.

I never charge people for helping them out, people may bring me a bottle of wine, six pack of beer, or trade me their specialty. For instance I have acquired a personal nutritionist and massage therapist at "friends and family" rate this way.

So the guy messages me last night, he's looking to get a used iMac so he can learn them in order to stop turning away business.

I tell him he should get a laptop instead, if you know about Macs and Target Disc or Target Display Mode you'll understand why they are valuable to take on site for trouble shooting.

There were a few Macs that recently popped up on our local trading posts so I searched for them and found one that was a Macbook Pro, I7 with 8GB of RAM but had display issues. Seller wanted $200.

I get in touch with seller and the box is still available so I arrange to meet at lunch today.

Tell my guy about it, it's a great machine and depending on the display issue it could be as cheap as a $25 inverter card or the GPU is toast which likely means a new motherboard at $500 so let's go look at it and see what we've got. The thing about that box is it has two video cards, a higher end AMD and a standard run of the mill Intel 3000. If one or the other is toast you can always switch the system out to and run the good one. The higher end card is the default and for his needs the Intel card would have been fine so this may be a $0 solution.

This morning he says he can't make it so I decide screw it, I'll go check it out anyway.

I already knew they yanked the hard drive so I make a quick system boot disc on a portable Firewire drive and head out. For a second I think to bring a power brick as well but figured they had it.

I meet at the Chiropractic office where the woman works and of course they don't have the power brick there and the battery is dead so I can't even boot it up to see what the issue is. Turns out she lives 1/4 mile down the road from me in the next subdivision so we arrange to meet up again later in the day.

Well later in the day I'm pressed for time and nearly blow it off but stop at her house anyway. I take a gamble that the thing is worth at least $200 in parts, hand her cash and go on my way.

Later at home I try to boot it, display is garbled and eventually the box grey screens and reboots, starts up, grey screens and reboots. It does that a few times and I think "awesome I may have just made a huge score"

There was an issue with that particular model related to the use of lead free solder that resulted in that exact behavior. It was so prevalent that in February Apple issued an open repair program. They will fix it free regardless if it's out of original 1 year warranty or not.

I hit Apples support site for the program, pop in the box's serial number and they confirm it's from the effected batch.

So Monday I'm going to stop by my local Apple Store and drop it off.

In a week or so I should get back what was originally sold as a $2,000 laptop good as new.

[jyl]

Wow! That's the kind of deal you get when you're very very knowledgeable.

[Gogar]

Awesome! I'm very comfortable elbow-deep inside MacBooks so I love your story.