Happy Father’s Day Weekend!

We wish you all a fabulous Father’s Day weekend! Keep Dad up to speed with his gadgets and treat him to a repaired device. Walk on in or visit our website www.missionrepair.com to start your order today.

Macbook Pro Battery + Heat = Bad!

Hello everyone –

Having worked around Lithium batteries for several years now it’s always interesting to see one swell up with no apparent physical damage to it. With news stories of iPhone batteries spontaneously combusting on airlines and in people’s beds, it makes you wonder what caused these events. I’m no scientist, but what I do know is that heat can play a big role in the health and life-span of batteries. Laptops, cellphones and tablets are great portable devices that people literally take with them everywhere. However, the worst abuse I see and hear about is people who use their laptop in bed and lay them on a blanket or pillow as they watch a movie. Guilty as charged… I forget sometimes myself! This becomes somewhat of the perfect storm of “heat” for lithium batteries.

Watching videos and especially movies can push a computer to near 100% sustained useage of the CPU and graphics card for hours on end. Given the fact the CPU and GPU (Central Processing Unit) or as some call it the “chip” and the Graphics Processing Unit which handles and decodes all graphics and video. Pushing these two components generate a lot of heat, as in pushing upwards of 180 to 200+ degrees farenheit. Typically at 212F the computer will shut itself down to protect itself.

In addtion to the fans running full speed, the design of say a macbook aluminum body will try to dissipate heat, and now in contact with a blanket or pillow, is effectivly acting like a layer of heat trapping insulation! Not exactly what the engineers had planned on. This all adds up to a lot of heat that the computer cannot dissipate fast enough to keep things nice and cool. Over time this takes its toll on many parts of the computer from the battery, graphics card, fans and other heat sensitive components. Bottom line heat is the enemy of pretty much any gadget with a battery and CPU so some small steps to keep the gadgets cool can prevent all sorts of nasty things!

So when things go wrong and your battery fails come see us at Mission Repair to your gadgets back in working order. We service many models of Macbook Pro’s and can get you a new battery and make sure your battery never looks like the one above.

Have a great day!

Jeff

 

 

I walked into my Mission store and saw this:

Hello there friends,

I made a surprise visit to my Mission location yesterday..unannounced…and found my guys watching cartoons!  Yeah, you may know it.  It was “He-Man” from the 1980’s!

Just as I was getting close to letting my team hear an earful, I calmly asked “why is He-Man running on this customer’s MacBook?”  I’m a fair guy.  I don’t mind the employees listening to music while they work, or even tune the radio to AM to listen to a Royals games now and again.  But watching cartoons while you’re on the clock?  It ain’t happening.  I was looking for the ring leader.

Carl stepped up and said “It’s me.”  Mmmm boy, here we go!

“Ryan, this customer was having issues with Youtube shutting down randomly, and I’ve pinpointed it to the RAM in this unit.  I diagnosed it, tried it myself after I was able to duplicate the issue, and now it appears to be solved.  I’m now running the first long video that I could find, and He-Man was it.”  He goes on to say “It’s been running for a long time, but this is a 10-hour marathon and I wanted to make sure that our customer didn’t have the same issue after I repaired the computer.”

Well then.  I grabbed a large piece of humble pie and took a bite.  Those guys weren’t messing around.  They were testing a repair.  GREAT!

That means apparently I do condone cartoons while we’re on the clock.  As long as you tell me it’s for “testing” purposes, that’s all I need to hear!

Bonus points…what was He-Man’s tag line?  “I HAVE THE POWER!”  I can personally remember that opening sequence of the cartoon, apparently it’s a keeper in my mental files.

So rest knowing that if you bring your MacBook Pro in for repair: we may watch some cartoons on it.  But it’s for a good cause, and this customer was thrilled that we did.  It’s a highly technical operation, but someone has to do it 😉

Take care, Ryan

 

 

Water and electronics don’t mix.

Good morning,

Water and electronics don’t mix.  Unless your electronics are waterproof that is!

It’s more common than you might think; but we receive items in for repair on a daily basis that show signs of liquid damage and without doubt if you get your iPhone wet, you’re bound to see problems unless it is addressed.

My guess is that some of these customers don’t even know that they had a liquid spill or had any contact with water/soda/coffee whatsoever. Knowing can be a key.

For example, here’s a logic board that came out of a 2014 MacBook Pro with Retina Screen; and the device was not displaying video.

If you look closely, and I know that it’s hard to tell; but can you see that chip that is on the logic board that says “Apple 2010”? (It’s actually upside down)  It’s about dead center in the picture…there is an IC that is on top of it with slightly green corrosion that is growing from some sort of liquid that got onto the board.

I know, the picture doesn’t do it much justice, and I even almost missed it.  For scale, that component just below it is the headphone jack port, which is very small in itself…this was a minute amount of corrosion on the MacBook Pro Logic Board that was causing a major amount of problems!

So I cleaned it up and guess what?  Video displayed back on the screen again.  This would have been a $680 repair had this customer went directly to Apple…but it was just took me one hour of labor to complete it.  The customer makes out and Mission Repair saves the day.

We offer a full-line of liquid damage repairs; but to be realistic, not all of these are repairable.  If your MacBook was sitting at the bottom of the lake for week, it’s probably not repairable.  But if you spill a cup of coffee on the keyboard of your computer; turn it off quickly and give us a call.  We will do our best to save your day too!

Take care,  Ryan

Computer logic board repair at Mission Repair.

Hello there friends,

Every day we receive Macs and PC’s in for repair; and some times there are subtle issues that are bigger than one might think!

Recently I had a very nice customer that was simply trying to install a new solid state storage drive into his 17″ MacBook Pro; but the computer wasn’t wanting to install any new software.

He brought the unit into us, and at first I was sure that he just had a bad drive cable. So I tried a new cable but had the same issue. I tried another new hard drive with the same result. I tried the RAM, isolating everything that I could but drilled it down to a logic board (mother board) issue. Once I pulled the logic board from the unit, it was easy to see a burnt IC and resistor (center of the pic!):

The tricky part about this computer is that pretty much seems like it’s OK until you try to install software. Wow…there is just something wrong with the “logic” in this logic board!

So a little bit of surface mount rework and we will have this unit back and running perfectly for the customer.

I just want to let you know that a failing logic board can show it’s ugly head in a lot of ways. It can have no power, distorted video, not reading the memory or hard drives correctly and a myriad of other possible issues. Just keep these things in mind if you’re having computer problems, and that Mission Repair can solve them.

Have a good Wednesday! Ryan