Andrew Macpherson

I love my MacBook Air, it’s beautifully light and small.  Mostily it’s light, and so can go in my camera bag when I travel without my having to turf out half my lenses (except when flying Ryanair), so it was a great blow when the hinge fell apart.

It turns out that this is a well documented failure mode, for some units.  Just a well, as replacing two bits of shoddy plastic hinge might otherwise cost £350, to replace the whole screen.  The repair was rejected by 2 authorized repairers before I got on to Apple directly citing the notes in their own fora.  Apple of course came up trumps, and said that their repairers had been notified to watch out for this fault.

However since it came back the keyboard and track pad (did I say how nice the track pad on these is BTW?) have gone out to lunch, been replaced, and on arriving back here again were both still away for coffee — not even working at bios level.  🙁 .   This time I plugged in an external keyboard and mouse, to un-register Photoshop before sending it away again — two weeks with Photoshop in three months is difficult, even when you have 16G CF cards in your camera.

So this leads to the point of this article — I bought a MacMini to tide me over till the laptop returned, and made a mistake, so I hope I can save you from the hassle.

Install Photoshop first

Install Photoshop before loading up your print drivers, your scanner software and so on.  Everything wants to add it’s own plug-in to Photoshop though few have genuine plug-ins for CS4, yet they still want to try

This saves a lot of time.

Oh and my MacBook Air I’m still waiting for TNT to pick it up to go for re-repair,  The repairers said they were arranging pick-up on Friday, so I had to make sure someone was in to hand it over. Monday was a public holiday, so with any luck it will go away today, be delivered and diagnosed Wednesday, parts delivered Thursday, and be back here on err Monday..  So another moral — buy your repair insurance direct from the manufacturer, either with next-day on-site, or if you have a nearby authorized service centre that you can drive to, go with that.   Don’t whatever you do go with the store’s ”extended warranty.”  Oh and don’t forget you have 2 years warranty under EU Consumer Law anyway.