Troubleshooting-Swollen Batteries & Itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny Fonts!

Swollen Battery!

Original Post Jul 21, 2009

I knew I needed a new laptop, when I realized my hard drive was almost full, but when the battery started to suddenly swell, now I had a really good excuse. The first signal that I had a problem was when my computer suddenly shut down before the battery was dead with no notice. I have talking alerts on my computers, so I’m used to the voice coming on and saying, “You are now running on reserve power.” As I was plugging the laptop in, I noticed that there was this slight bulge in the battery.

I’ve been oggling the new MacBook pro laptops, since they were released a couple of months ago,so this battery problem was my final rationalization for getting a new one. So off I went online and ordered my new 17″ and a new battery for my old one. The new battery came first and really just in time, because the battery had swollen even more. I went online and saw that this bulging battery was something that a number of people had experienced. I read their stories and saw that some managed to get reimbursed even though their warranty had expired. That gave me evidence that I would soon put to use.

A day later, last Friday, my new 17″ MacBook Pro arrived. It’s always exciting opening the box and seeing a thing of beauty. Once I had it out of the box, I realized that the new verison uses a different firewire cable- 800. I only had 400 to 400 firewire cable, so I’d have to make a trip to the Apple Store for a new cable. I figured I’d use the opportunity to also try to get reimbursed for the old swollen battery.  The first guy that was helping me at the mac store didn’t seem to know what he was talking about, didn’t really know that the older models used 400 firewire cable, but he managed to find the cable I needed. I pulled out the battery and told him about the problem. He said he couldn’t do anything because that computer wasn’t under warranty, and that if I wanted to talk to someone I’d have to make an appointment and come back. I told him this was a bit ridiculous and said forget it then, and I went to the cash. Really I was looking for someone who knew more or someone who could make a decision.

I checked out the candidates and stood in that line. As I was paying I pulled out the battery and began explaining the problem telling the Mac person that I had been online and seen that this was an ongoing problem with 17″ MacBook Pros. It wasn’t long before she went and got a new battery, opened the box and gave me a new one. She told me I could just return this new battery in the box I had at home or I could keep it as a backup. Mission accomplished new battery and new firewire cable!

Once I was home I couldn’t wait to set things up. I figured there might be some things I would have to configure once my data was transferred so I was ready for that. I plugged in both my laptops, attached the firewire, went through a few clicks and magically my information was being transferred.  There was a lot of info to transfer so I went off for a couple of hours and came back…lickedy-split.. .done. I restarted the new laptop and magic everything looked exactly like my other laptop. And everything configured exactly the same,  even my wireless was configured!  The only thing I had to do was plug a few of my serial numbers into a couple of programs to activate them.

MacBook Pro

 In a few minutes I was doing my normal things on this new beauty. I noticed suddenly the beautiful resolution, but also how tiny all the fonts looked. First step was to check out the resolutions. My other laptop’s resolution was 1680 X1050, but this one is 1920X1200. I checked the lower resolution but didn’t like the way it looked; it appeared almost fuzzy. I tried a few others but decided to go back to the crisp 1920X 1200 and google a solution to the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny fonts.

I found lots of people who had found the same thing. One suggested solution was to go into the browser preferences of firefox and increase the font size there. I tried that and it worked but I still was finding some sites I went to, the font was so tiny. I knew there were some accessibility features in mac but I’d never had to use them before. It was late and I figured I’d look more into it the next day. The phone rang and I was soon talking about my new mac.  I was relating the story of the tiny fonts and my friend said, “Just press command and +” I turned on the laptop again, went to a page and pressed ” command +” bingo! I could make any page as large as I wanted. I asked myself, why didn’t I know about this trick, and why did he know? Oh yeah, I don’t need reading glasses! Of course he knew about this feature, he needed it. What this taught me about troubleshooting is that sometimes people who are not necessarily experts can help you. There’s a big difference between nice to know and need to know.

Analysis
Description of the problem/context:
My new computer has a beautiful resolution but it makes the fonts really small.

Possible causes: For every increase in resolution, the fonts will appear smaller.

Possible Solutions: Choose a lower resolution, change font sizes on computer, search google for other people’s  experience

Action Taken: Check the appearance of resolutions; adjust font size in Firefox, talk to friend discover “command +”

Reflection: Sometimes we don’t know an answer to something because we have never “needed” to know it; it might have been something that was nice to know so we didn’t keep it high priority. A person who needs to use that information, although they may not be as technical as you can teach you something!