HotCat.org

So my CD-RW/DVD-R drive in my MacBook died on Friday. It was acting funky for a while (mainly: unable to play many DVD’s) but when it didn’t eject my CD, things had gotten bad. In order to rescue the CD and to see if there was an obvious problem, I opened ‘er up and dug all the way to the drive. Not particularly hard, but not for the faint of heart. I think I messed it up even more by doing this, but wtf it was broken already and now I have my CD back.

This is the second Matshita (as one poster mentioned, “shit is in their name”) that failed on me, the other in a Mini. I’m not terribly hard on my drives, but I do use them for watching DVD’s and ripping CD’s. Luckily with the Mini it was still under warrantee and I didn’t mind losing it for a week or two (it’s now strapped to the back of my Toshiba LCD HDTV, cooool). My laptop, however, is my life and my world; where I do my work and where I keep all of my most valuable stuff (including my entire [150GB] music collection, thanks to a 250GB WD hd, yay!)

So, now I can:

1. live without a CD drive (not difficult, nowadays)
2. send the MacBook in for repair, for an indeterminate time/cost
3. buy a new Matshita drive for > $180 online (only one retailer I know of, Apple tries to keep companies from selling parts)
4. buy an external DVD drive
5. buy a new MacBook and move my HD over, and
   1. repair my current MacBook (myself, or through Apple) and try to sell it
   2. give it to a friend or family member
   3. make it into my hotcat.org server, replacing my PPC Mini (which I could sell)

I suspect I’ll go with item #1. I am definitely not fond of losing my MacBook to repair. I suspect Apple will come out with a significant jump in their MacBook line soon, so I’ll hold out ’til then. Why Apple doesn’t use two vendors for drives is surprising to me; particularly given the poor reputation Matshita has.