William Hook’s Blog

Up until last week, I had been running Windows XP in a virtual machine, using VMware Fusion, on my iMac, and then, when I got it, my MacBook. However, on Friday, the virtual machine just suddenly gave me a BSOD (OS X itself remained fine though).

Before I go on, some people have asked me why I run a Windows virtual machine on my MacBook. The reason I do it is because I still can’t find OS X alternates for mIRC and Microsoft Visio that I like, and other programs I use, such as mkv2vob, are Windows only. Plus, I keep it running because several people I know are *only* on Steam and/or Xfire for IM. Crazy, I know, I use WLM, YIM, AIM, GTalk, Jabber, MobileMe, and Facebook for IM, and yet a small handful of people still only want to use Steam and Xfire for IM. Oh well.

Anyway, I wasn’t doing anything amazing just then, just mIRC and Steam. That was it. So, I rebooted the virtual machine itself, and that worked fine. Until about 60 minutes later, when OS X itself decided to kernel panic (which looks something like this). And it kept doing it over and over again, even with VMware completely closed. So, I decided to try a reinstall of OS X, and started backing up all my stuff off the HDD. However, by the time I was almost done, I’d had several crashes, and by Saturday night my MacBook refused, outright, to boot up.

If I pressed the power button, it would turn itself on, but the screen didn’t turn on at all. I tried all the suggestions on the Apple support site, including clearing the NVRAM or whatever it was called, I tried booting up in “safe mode”, tried booting to the Apple Hardware Test (this requires the OS X install DVD, which my MacBook decided to eat and not give back, too)…nothing worked! So, I decided to go to the Apple Store where I had got it, at the Bullring in Birmimgham (this was on Sunday). The guy who helped was very friendly, however all the Apple Geniuses were booked for that day, so he said I’d have to come back another day, or, if I wanted, he could swap the machine on the spot for a new one. I chose to do that, but, I took it back home first, plugged the HDD into my old iMac, and got all the remaining files off the HDD first. Took it back on Monday, and they swapped it out for a brand new MacBook, all in about 10 minutes. Easy.

Brought it home, and installed all my apps again, copied all my music to the HDD, and this time, I’m not running Windows XP in a virtual machine. I’ve decided to just use Linkinus for IRC, and if I do need Visio, Steam, Xfire, or mkv2vob, I’ll use my old Vaio laptop for those.

So far, so good. Except for one thing. On the now dead MacBook, I had one issue with the keyboard, and one issue only - the F keys at the top were all slanted slightly to the left. Other people have had the same issue too. There’s a discussion on the Apple support forum too, somewhere, about the same issue. However, I can live with that. What I can’t live with, however, is that on this new MacBook, both the N and M keys keep coming loose. And the O key squeaks against the aluminum.

Now, in no way do I type roughly, I think my typing could be considered “moderate”. I don’t type “super lightly”, but I don’t hit the keys hard either. However, after just 4 hours or so with this replacement, the O key sqeaks (the top of it is rubbing against the aluminum unibody), and the N and M keys, if I type quickly, keep coming loose. This is extremely annoying, as I type fast, all the time. While typing this blog post alone, the keys have popped up about 20-30 times! The easiest way to explain this is that if I type something, and my finger hits either key and slides even slightly to the left, the key pops up! Here’s a pic of them both popped up:

The only way I can seem to get around this is to type slowly (which is annoying), or to not use the N or M keys at all (which is just stupid). It’s easy to fix, all I have to do is push them down again. But doing that over and over and over again is EXTREMELY annoying. And, because Apple class the keyboard as part of the whole unibody, if I get it fixed they’ll probably insist on giving me another replacement. Great. This is also annoying because every time I go to the Apple store, it costs £8.30 in train fares to go from Stafford to Birmingham New Street.

Hopefully though, they can somehow replace the individual key itself (because I think the two clips on the bottom-right of they keys has broken or something). Regardless, I’m going to forward a link to this post to the boffins there, and, HOPEFULLY, they can post me the two keys so I can maybe try and replace them myself. Please, Apple?

I also don’t seem to be having much luck recently. First my PS3 dies last month, and now this. What next?