Sunday, October 05, 2014

Dying MacBook Pro "Late 2008 Model"

My late 2008 MacBook Pro is slowly dying on me. It all started when my older built-in HDD drive started slowing down so I swapped it with a Crucial SSD and bumped the RAM from 4GB up to 8GB. Ever since I had that upgrade my Mac improved in terms of performance but it went downhill in regards to portability; the battery life is being leeched so badly it could only last for an hour or even less. Then few months ago I had an incident where I pressed the power button but it never booted up. I detached and reinstalled the battery and for some odd reason it booted just fine making me put the blame on the battery (Late 2008 MBP battery is accessible by removing the latch at the bottom unlike newer unibody models).

Then few weeks ago I encountered the same problem but this time the first method never resolved the issue and so after almost an hour trying to figure out a way to make it boot, out of desperation, I blew air into the optical drive opening just like we used to do with Sega & Nintindo game cartridges (old school gamers can relate), and yet to my shock it worked! That also lead to one conclusion... Removing the optical drive because it was useless and wasn't working for a very long time anyways hence I swapped it with a dual drive enclosure and installed an HDD. The process was a smooth one and the Mac went on working normally again up until yesterday when I came to boot it and it didn't work. Yet again it took me a couple of hours of attaching and detaching things until it booted one last time for a quick sweeping backup. Now I'm not really sure what might be causing it not to boot but I honestly do not want it to die on me, at least not this year.

If you have experienced something similar or have a fix please contact me in the comments.