The other day I spilled naked juice on my macbook pro, I immediately shut it off, and dried it out. I quickly wiped it off with some isopropyl alcohol and let it dry overnight upside down. I waited about 2 days.

I took the laptop apart, looking for any signs of liquid damage, luckily there was none. It did smell fruity tho. I even checked the logic board to see if there were any issues. None.

So I put the laptop back together and pressed the power button. NOTHING. I did a quick search online, found iFixIt…I’ve known about them for a long time, and usually use their site as a way to see the basic steps of how to disassemble. Looked around and found that its possible that only the keyboard shorts, and if that happens then the power button wont work.

There is a way to jump the keyboard so that the laptop will turn on. On the keyboard connector, near the middle there are 2 pins that you just have to jump together, I used my screwdriver to do it. And miraculously my laptop turned on. Awesome. My trackpad was still working also.

kb_shortjump

I looked further on the iFixIt site, and they only sell the full upper assembly for $299, and not the individual keyboard, I don’t need the full upper assembly because only the keyboard is shorted, not the trackpad. So I looked online and found some keyboard replacements for $30. I went with PT Supermarket, the website looks kinda sketch, but we’ll see how it goes.

Another site that I found pretty useful was:
EveryMac – you can search for your computer model by serial number. This is how I verified that the keyboard model would work in my laptop.

My macbook pro was a MacBook Pro “Core 2 Duo” 2.26 13″ (SD/FW) 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo (P8400)
and the Keyboard (A1278) matches.

In June 2011, I upgraded my macbook pro (MacBook Pro 13″/15″/17″ Unibody with Core 2 Duo “Penryn” and 9400M G chipset (Mid 2009): max, 8GB), with 8GB of RAM. I bought the Corsair RAM (CMSA8GX3M2A1066C7) from newegg.com

At first (running Snow Leopard OS X 10.6), it crashed every once in a while, but I figured that going to OS X Lion (10.7) would fix it. I was wrong. Lion seems to magnify all there is to these crashes. I would get the grey screen of death as well as applications randomly quitting. These issues seem to escalate as I kept updating from 10.7 to 10.7.2

As always, I thought it was the install of my Lion, as I had just updated on top of Snow Leopard, which on forums was said to be a bad practice.

Finally I got sick of my crashes and googled around and found this forum where they mentioned that it was Lion and its finicky-ness with bad memory. I had never thought that the memory would be the issue. here

So the forum member suggested running rember which is basically a os x wrapper over memtest

I started my system in single user boot mode and ran the test. Unfortunately the forum describes the wrong procedure to run the test, I’ve included it below:

  1. Download rember and put it on the root of your HD
  2. Start up in single user boot mode (hold down Command-S)
  3. Navigate to rember (/Rember.app/Contents/Resources)
  4. Execute memtest with default settings (./memtest)

After removing my 8GB RAM and reinstalling my 2GB standard RAM, it seems to become more stable.