Lazycoder

Classic case of knows-too-much

This is a classic case of knowing too much and trying to solve the problem yourself.

Scott Stewart took an Apple laptop in to the “Genius bar” (Yeah, I’m using quotes around it. I haven’t been impressed with the geniuses at the genius bar myself) because it would run hot on the left hand side of the keyboard after it had been on for a while. He made a bunch of assumptions about the hardware based on his previous knowledge and had a pre-defined plan for what the tech support person should do. Then he got upset when the tech support person didn’t follow his script.

He called me a few weeks into college to tell me that his laptop was getting very hot under where his left palm would rest when typing. I immediately assumed a battery problem. After a few seconds of research, I found that recently there had been a few recalls on Apple laptop batteries. So, we had him pull out the battery and check it against this list of recalls. Having him do this, we realized that his battery was located under the area where his right palm rested, not his left. Not good. This probably meant his hard-drive was below the problem area.

It turns out that the hard drive ISN’T located under the battery on any Powerbook or iBook model I could find. It is localed near the battery though. I can’t remember all of the times that I’ve had someone with some technical expertise try to apply that knowledge to something they don’t know anything about. Back when I did tech support for users, I’d always have someone telling me “I think it’s my blah that’s bad” when the problem was completely unrelated. In Scott’s case, his panic was compounded by Google. He found the recall of some iBook batteries from a few months ago and started to wonder if the batter would blow up because it was too hot and his son would loose all his data.

FYI, my iBook runs a little hot under my left palm after I’ve used it for a little while IF I’m using it with the AC adapter plugged in. I haven’t noticed any problems in over a year. As far as I know, it’s a known problem with Power PC based Apple laptops (and probably one of the reasons they are switching to Intel chips).

That being said, if something goes wrong with my Apple. Chances are I’m heading to the local user group first before I wait around 45 minutes at the “genius bar”. I’ve probably forgotten more about computers than the “genius” helping me knows. Damn whippersnappers.