Spencer Wen

After putting off the upgrade for about a year and a half, I finally swapped out the battery in my early 2011 MBP with new...

Wound up taking my computer to the Apple Store since they had an opening. They will spend quite a bit of time giving you their disclaimer that they won't do any repairs for you since you've installed 3rd party parts into the system - ignore this. The battery replacement is a ridiculously easy job, and you don't want to be paying them to undo a couple screws anyway. Anyhow, they ran a test that confirmed the problem was with the battery. It took maybe five minutes, and the same test also verified that everything else was in good working order (logic board, MagSafe port, charging adapter, etc). I also wound up getting my replacement battery on warranty from iFixit later that day, and the early returns on this new battery are encouraging so far. Lastly, I want to add that I learned it's supposed to take about 4 hours for your MBP to fully charge from empty. The first 0% to 80% is done via "fast charging", and is supposed to take about 2 hours. The last 80% to 100% is done via "trickle charging", and is...

The dual hard drive enclosure that I just received, cannot be secured back into the spot the optical drive was in. It fits snugly - but the two areas that are meant to be used with the screws to secure the enclosure are too small. Basically, the screw itself CAN fit through the space provided - but the head of the screw is too wide, and is being obstructed by the side of the hard drive enclosure. Also, I noticed there is not a third such secure point on the enclosure for where the third screw was at. Right now, I sort of just have the enclosure sitting in the area, as I didn’t want a gaping hole in the laptop body, but I want to know what iFixit is going to do to fix this.

Can’t secure the hard drive holder to those two left screw placements. I was able to get them out without any problem - but the dual hard drive holder piece doesn’t have the right dimensions for me to re-secure the part to the upper part of the case. Basically, the head of the screw is “too wide”, and cannot be forced past the side of the drive enclosure. Will be sending pictures to iFixit, as this needs to be fixed. Right now, I’ve got an empty hard drive enclosure (since the SSDs are out of stock, and I had a stuck CD in the optical drive that was really causing a lot of slow-downs and grinding noises) just sort of sitting in there. Figured it was a bad idea to leave a huge gaping space.