Macbook woes

On Sunday, I tried to burn a CD in my new Macbook Pro that I bought 6 months ago, but to my dismay it spat the blank disk right back out like a 3 year-old spits out canned spinach. Frustrated, I tried another blank disk, followed by another, but only more 3 year-old fits occured with these disks too. At first, I wanted to give the laptop the benefit of the doubt because my newest CD-R was at least 4 years old (I bought a 50-pack in college). So for sanity's sake I put in a DVD-R that I had burnt a home movie onto to see if the computer would spit that out too. And since you're reading this, you can probably guess that the computer refused to read that disk too. As a last resort I put in the OS X install/restore disks that Apple provided and the computer refused to read those as well. So now I knew something was up and I did some research online and I found out that many people with supposed "bad hardware" had the drive malfunction after the latest Apple superdrive firmware update.

Luckily, my Apple is still under warranty. So I took it into my local Apple store to have tech support verify that my drive was indeed toast. Because I am the luckiest person alive, the first blank CD-R they placed in the drive was read just fine. I got worried. I thought to myself, "These guys are going to force me to take back a broken drive just because this one disk works" Lucky for me, even though the computer recognized this disk, it refused to burn any amount of data to the disk because the "data was too large" according to the on-screen error message. The technician also noticed a weird noise coming from the drive so he said he'd have it replaced. Phew, that was close! Of course he also noticed another problem, which was most likely on the software side that has me worried if replacing the drive will fix. There was only one burn speed , maximum, available. I sure hope the drivers are not corrupt now after the superdrive firmware update and I will be able to set my burn speed again!

While I was still at the Apple store, I decided to bring up another rather minor issue I had noticed since I first received my Mac. I have a magical "J" key that sometimes will not register a keypress even if the key was fully depressed. This probably happened about 50% of the time if I typed fast and with lighter keystrokes. But that day, the key worked wonderfully for the technician. I swear this computer has a mind of its own! Luckily, I was able to reproduce it readily by pressing "J" followed by "K" repeatedly. The technician then removed the key and noted that the rubber spacer under the key was almost completely torn off and that caused the misalignment that caused the key presses not to register. My luck had changed and the technician ordered a new keyboard. They say the parts will be in the store within 2 days and the repair will take up to 2 days. Although I don't like the fact that my computer will be gone for 2 days, they say that no data would be lost if I had the computer repaired in house as opposed to shipping it off to a service center. Yay Apple!