A few days ago I blogged about the noise Mackie’s fan was making and the steps I used to try to fix it. I’ve longed opened him up and clean his fan and other parts of him so now he is quietly working again and not giving me hyperventilation when I looked at his sporadic temperature increases. Since I was not able to find an online walkthrough that guided me when I opened him up I’m gonna make one now hoping it would help other users.

Tools:

• Phillips #00 Screwdriver
• T6 Torx Screwdriver
• Spudger or a Tweezer
• WD40

If you are near a Walmart I recommend you buy these items from them rather than order online and wait 7 days.

Walmart offers a Stanley set of screwdrivers that comes in a nifty kit so you need not worry about misplacing it.

You might also want to get compressed air to clean the dusty insides of your Mac and not think of unscrewing

unnecessary parts.

Now you will need to disassemble your portable. Most people will rate this as “difficult” but personally I think it is “easy if you are coordinated”. But if you are not comfortable seeing your portable like the one in the left then I suggest you go a different route such as have a trusty guy (better if he owns a Mac himself) to do it for you or send it to the nearest genius bar. Given the type of casing the 2007 model and earlier of MacBooks one of the things you may encounter when you open it up or even if you don't is the chipping on the sides or edges of the Mac's upper case. Usually this happens when your Mac stays in generally hot and humid environments. The continuous change in temperature will also cause your Mac's case to be brittle causing chipping on the edges. How to prevent it? Well I can't tell you to move but you can ensure that your Mac doesn't get exposed to too much heat. If the chipping is way too much distracting for you go ahead and order online for the top case with keyboard. Replacing the topcase is easy and usually costs $140.00; other than that, as soon as

you can afford to, upgrade to the lastest MacBook or MacBook Pro which is made of aluminum.

Now the step by step guide I will list below is mainly focused on cleaning your Mac's fan NOT replacing a defective fan or installing a fan. So have your tools ready and let's get started...

STEP 1:

Unplug your charger from your Mac.

Use a coin to rotate the battery screw 90 degrees and lift the battery out to remove it.

STEP 2:

Unscrew three evenly-spaced Phillips screws

along the rear wall of the battery compartment.

These screws are captive for the memory cover.

Remove the L-shaped memory cover so it clears the battery compartment

opening and lift it up and out of the computer.

STEP 3:

Remove the following 3 screws:

~ One 11 mm Phillips in the middle of the case.
~ Two 14.5 mm Phillips at the upper part of the case.
✎ If the screws stick in the case, you can use a magnetized screwdriver to draw them out.
☝The shorter of the three screws goes in the middle.

STEP 4:

Remove the following 3 screws from the rear wall of the battery compartment:
~ Two 3 mm Phillips.
~ One 4 mm Phillips on the right side.

STEP 5:

Remove the two Phillips screws from either side of the right wall of the battery compartment (not the ones closest to the battery connector).

STEP 6:

Remove the four indicated Phillips screws from the front wall of the battery compartment. When working from the left, remove the 2nd, 4th, 7th and 9th screw.

STEP 7:

Remove the following 4 screws from the back of the computer:
~ Two 7 mm Philips on the far sides.
~ Two 10.5 mm Phillips toward the center.

STEP 8:

Remove the two Phillips screws from the optical drive side of the computer.

☝It is not necessary to remove the similar screws on the other side of the computer.

STEP 9:

☝ There's a trackpad and keyboard ribbon connecting the upper case to the logic board, so don't pull the upper case off entirely just yet.

Starting near the display and working around to the front of the computer, pry up on the upper case.

✎ The upper case is likely to stick at the connection above the optical drive. If this is the case first free all other sides, then proceed to pull upward on the upper case from either side of the optical drive opening.

STEP 10:

While holding up the upper case, pull up the black tab of the silver cable away from its connector.

✎ If there is no black tab, you can also use a spudger to gently pry the connector from its housing. This connector is tall, so be sure to pry straight up.

STEP 11:

☝In some MacBooks you have to use a spudger or tweezer to disconnect the orange optical drive cable from the
logic board before you can disconnect the black fan connector.
Use a spudger or tweezer to disconnect the black fan connector from the logic board.
✎ If you have a MacBook Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa/Penryn, the black fan connector resides in a different location.

STEP 12:

Deroute the fan cable from behind the tab on the left side of the fan.

STEP 13:

Peel up the silver foil tape between the fan and the optical drive.

STEP 14:

Use a spudger/tweezer to move the gray display data and black speaker cables to the right. This will reveal a

silver screw securing the fan housing to the lower case.

STEP 15:

Remove the following four screws:

~ Two black 3 mm Phillips on the upper left side and lower left of the fan.

~ One 3 mm Phillips on the right side of the fan.

~ One 6 mm Phillips on the left side of the fan.

STEP 16:

Lift the fan being careful not to rip the black tape.

Now you can start cleaning the fan.

☝The fan's blades can easily break so make sure you wipe it careful better if you use a cotton tip swab and the compressed air.

☝If you notice one of the blades are cracked or slightly bent already it is best to remove that blade as it will cause noise later and may cause your other blades to wear out faster.

☝If most of the blades are broken/cracked/bent I would recommend replacing your fan.

✎ A replacement fan is worth $50.00 and a MacBook Santa Rosa/Penryn Fan is about $40.00.

Put a little WD 40 in your fan's rotor once you are done cleaning the blades.

STEP 17:

You can remove the bottom of the fan's case and use the compressed air to clean it up. If you tilt your MacBook a little you will see the vents inside, better if you clean this part as well to ensure that it is free from dust and make cooling of your MacBook's CPU easier for your fan.

Congratulations! You are able to open your Mac, clean it up, and hopefully none of your nerves got frayed. Hopefully you do not have trouble putting back the screws where they belong. I guarantee you though that cleaning your own Mac will give you a better appreciation of it after. : )

Honestly, with the noise four year-old Mackie is emitting the past weeks I find myself hesitating using him already. And it’s not the sound really... I can deal with it as long as he isn’t awake when I’m trying to sleep, what’s more scary is how high the temperature rises when I start using Mackie. He just can’t cope anymore :’( especially when I multi-task chatting with my family and doing video calls with B, retrieving emails, downloading videos, surfing the web, and downloading music I would see from menubar the CPU’s temperature climb steadily from 63°C to 84°C within ten minutes. This is totally unacceptable and while some people (including Apple geniuses) may say you need to put your computer on a table I’ve had had no problem with Mackie’s temperature rising at such speed and such heat even when I would let him sit on my bed for hours. No, it’s not the porn (as if!) or virus (double as if!!!) that you may think is festering in my computer. The device inside a portable that can emit such racket that would affect a CPU’s temperature is it’s fan.

Of course, being trained by Apple I have searched for quick fixes that can remedy the problem. These are the things I’ve tried:

• Disused printer: Here is a link from MacRumors about a guy who upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard (10.4 to 10.5 for those who love numbers). Good for him that deleting some jurassic printer left behind in his Print & Fax list (found in System Preferences) fixed his problem. It didn’t for me.
• Memory usage: Seriously, the moment I read that some guy filled up his macbook’s hard drive with God knows what kind of files which caused his overheating problem I knew that this isn’t really a fix for Mackie. I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve used 98% of Mackie’s hard drive and he was still cool with it. And while this is not the current scenario (only 65% of his memory was being consumed) I decided to move music, DMGs, movies, pictures, logs, and other non-essential files to my external HD and see if that would fix it. Course it didn’t.
• Runaway applications: A long time ago, I was sitting in training class for Apple and one of the things that stuck in my head besides learning the brutal way of fixing OS issues was the fact that runaway applications can wreak havoc in a computer’s battery and can cause a CPU to work overtime ergo the overheating. Being a diligent student that I am (teeheehee!) I checked my Activity Monitor but there were no applications that have gone Rambo inside Mackie so this is a no-fix as well (check out this Kbase article if you want to give it a shot).
• Fan Speed: Obviously the reason why Mackie’s fan is making noise is because the fan is going hyperdrive in it’s rpm. I installed a third party software that can set a minimum and maximum speed (please check compatibility with your OS before installing). This application controlled the fan speed but not the overheating and the nasty noise Mackie was making so as much as this is a first aid solution, it was like putting a band aid on a foot long bleeder.
• SMC reset: My last resort is to reset Mackie’s SMC. Last resort because that means if Mackie’s fan does not shut up after I do the reset I will have no choice but to open him up. After doing the reset, I noticed the fan wasn’t that noisy anymore, for the next two hours at least and then after that it came back with a vengeance and the noise actually amped more than prior to me resetting the SMC.

I thought for a few days that maybe I can live with the noise despite it being so loud it can wake up the dead already. But a week ago while watching Fringe online I was alarmed to see the processor’s temperature reach 90°C and then the scariest thing happened to Mackie... he automatically shut down. OMG! As soon as I saw the black screen I felt goosebumps on my nape and my head started chanting, “Please do not be a kernel panic, please do not fry my hard drive again, please do not do not do not DO NOT FRY MY HARD DRIVE!!!” With held breathe I pressed the power button wait to hear the chime, then the grey screen with the spinning gear and then the blue screen. I was only able to exhale when I saw the login screen.

Mackie’s scary auto shut down has prompted me to search online for a walk thru on how to open him (MacBook NOT MacBook Pro) up and to clean my fan. The problem is:

THERE IS NO WALK THRU FOR IT!!!

Well...I could send it to an Apple or ARS to have them fix it. But I wouldn't. That is simply not an option for me because I know that they will take Mackie for two weeks and fix it but not really fix it. With the countless times I've read customer's bitch and write "Dear Steve Jobs...." I can guarantee myself that they will not fix my problem. I'm sure some of the Geniuses and Tier 3 and Tech Support are awesome, but there are those who aren't. And them I don't trust. Ironic, I know. So sue me. And did I mention how much $$$ it would cost to send in your toy just coz you're out of AppleCare already?! So I did what every smarty pants does, got my debit card and went to Walmart to buy stuff... Stuff to fix Mackie.

Coming up... opening up Mackie and making my own walk thru!

If I could write words

Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,

What a bonfire my letters would make.

If I could speak words of water,

You would drown when I said

"I love you."

I took a walk at Mission Creek a few kilometers from the house. Normally I would run. But after injuring my knee for running at pavements and trails last year I am not risking injuring it again this year. I noticed though that walking has a way of purging my thoughts... emptying my mind of every thing and being able to see other things such as the beauty of the coming spring. Unlike running, walking teaches me to relax and take the time to appreciate my surroundings rather than the focus and determination to up my ante and run longer than the last.

The past few days I have been confused by the emotional state in the house. It is really not easy dealing with a woman even if I’m a woman myself. And five of us living in one house can be somewhat chaotic at times. We’ve been through moments of so much joy and laughter together as well as frustration over each other’s personalities and moods and complete isolation from one another.

The hardest, I guess, for us to deal with is when one of us slips in depression or a state of emotional blackhole. I’ve seen it happen last year. I’ve seen it happen to me. Despite the immense sadness I felt I was observing them wanting to reach out to me but checking themselves before knocking at my door and retreating. I’ve seen the look of worry in my face as I go through the motions of living but emptiness reflected in my eyes. I’ve seen them wanting to shake me off my reverie but not attempting to touch me. One would think that because we are women, we speak the same language and given we have the same culture we would know what to say. But the truth is we don’t. Our ability to communicate to each other are hindered by our upbringing, likes, dislikes, preferences, ability to cope, and bajillions of other factors. Universally though, we understand that when situations in our life bring one of us down it’s best to keep our mouth shut, wait til the person is ready to talk and then listen only when she talks.

And so that is the situation now in Big Brother’s House. One of us is nursing a broken heart after being engaged for a long time with her boyfriend. She had plans of going home to the Philippines this year and get married with him and then petition him so he can move here with her. That was the plan. It was a great plan. It was a plan full of hope and promise.

As soon as I found out I wanted to tell her I completely understand what she feels. I completely understand how a long distance relationship can fizzle out. I completely understand how she can wonder why is she still alive when it seems her heart has stopped beating already. But I know if I do this, I don’t understand and I have forgotten what it felt like. Because at the time it happened to me I retreated and no words of sympathy could ease the pain or make me recover faster. The more my friends talked about it the more pain I felt and the only solace I could get was when I would go home and be alone.

Maybe the best way to help her too is by giving her space. It would seem that I don’t care as I continue to do whatever I am doing - working, going out, drinking with our other friends, shopping, watching movies or TV, and singing in the shower - while one of us is in pain. But if one breaks down because she experiences so much pain in her heart breaking down with her won’t fix things. So I’ll do “normal” things hoping that she will be able to recover sooner, praying to the Almighty that she will be given strength and hope.

Still, I wish I can do more for her. I wish I can be a better friend to her. I wish I can show her she is not alone in her pain. And I think I could. I could do something appropriate and do it without annoying her.