2011 Macbook Pro issues

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

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20 Sep 2006
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A friend of mine has some issues with her MacBook Pro, I believe it's a late 2011 13" version.

Summary of issues:

  • Sometimes it doesn't charge, and it says at times within the OS that the battery is faulty. She's tried two other chargers, same issue.
  • It runs really slow at times, and although files save, after a power cycle or reboot, they're gone. She uses Photoshop on it, and if she saves a file in TIFF format, preview shows the file as blurry. She has to zoom in for it to go clear.
  • Sometimes it refuses to eject external drives.

I asked her to run the Hardware test, it passed everything. This was the extended test which took about an hour. She's been quoted over £200 to replace the battery alone, I've told her to buy one Amazon and I'll change it for her, I've done it before so it's easy enough.

Would it be safe to assume that the HDD needs changing? She said she can spend up to £200 on it which would get a 500GB SSD and a new battery, I'll do all the labour for her and get it restored.

I guess I could replace the battery for her, then do a full TM backup, rebuild the OS completely through recovery, then do a TM restore.

I don't know enough about OS X to know if the file saving issue could be a quirk or actual hardware fault.

Any other ideas? I don't want her to buy the SSD to find out that something else may be knackered.
 
Last edited:
So, she brought it around and for the past 4 hours I've been working on it. Disk Utility was indeed showing errors, and after several failed attempts of getting into Recovery or booting of my Yosemite USB install stick I finally figured out it's still on Snow Leopard and you need the DVD. Of course she bought it second hand so doesn't have it.

Fine I thought, I'll TM backup onto a spare 1.5TB HDD I have here. Started off well, but after an hour it ground to a half. She said the last backup was 6+ months ago and it took well over 6 hours. So I gave up on that and decided to just run the Yosemite installer. This ended up failing. Things weren't going well!

I saw a pop up asking if a TCP packet was allowed out to Apple, she explained someone at Uni put some software on for her for something to stop updates, so after a bit of Googling I found out it was stopping the upgrade, so got rid of it and all of a sudden Yosemite started installing. It was stuck for a fair while so I brought up the live log and it had detected the knackered boot partition and did 2 repair passes. After about 2 hours it finally installed and all is looking well, but doing a verify disk brought up more errors. We had some food and I explained she should do a backup overnight and fingers crossed it will work. She's ordered a 500GB SSD, an upgrade to 8GB of RAM and a new battery which should give it a massive new lease of life.

She's going to America soon and wants to edit film and video while she's out there and doesn't want to upgrade the MBP till after she's back for financial reasons. Fingers crossed it backs up and restores onto the SSD. I explained the RAM and SSD upgrade will do wonders. Now just have to work out why there's over 200GB showing in 'Other'.
 
New SSD in, RAM upgraded to 8GB and she's over the moon, says it's like a new Mac. I was sent the wrong battery so that's getting returned for the correct version, but even the battery seems to hold charge now - albeit only for around 30 minutes. Still better than sub 5 which it managed before.
 
How much did you spend on the battery? Similar situation for me as my girlfriend also has a 2011 15 inch MBP and the battery was expanding so had to be removed. It's currently running on mains alone and I'm keen to put a new battery in there. Not keen to spend £200 on a 4 year old laptop however.
 
My old 13" batter died as well, new one wasn't as good as the Apple one, but it still laster a few hours.

She spent a little on hers as she does video editing and photo editing on it plus needed the extra space. She can't really afford a new one so a new lease of life seemed the ideal option.
 
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