When you’re trying to convince an Apple Store Genius that your nine-month-old MacBook Air inexplicably stopped working and you most certainly did not pour a steaming cup of coffee all over it, there’s one question you definitely don’t want to hear: How come it smells like hazelnut?

So as I walked away with a $750 repair estimate and the world’s thinnest $1799 paperweight, I pondered my options: 1) toss it in the river and wait for all those tablet rumors to come true; 2) stab it repeatedly and buy a ThinkPad; or 3) try my hand at fixing it.

After some lengthy looks at my carving knife, the latter option won out.

It’s not as if I’m a complete stranger to do-it-yourself Mac repairs. Back when I owned a Power Mac G4, I upgraded the processor and hard drive, swapped out the graphics card for an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti, modded the case with a blue led, and fixed a pesky buzzing speaker. And before I sold it to raise funds for my MBA purchase, I fitted my 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a speedier, larger hard drive.

But that’s bush league compared to a complete disassembly of one of the most expensive Macs I’ve ever owned. (Of course, the stress level is significantly lessened when the computer does little more than emit the not-so-faint aroma of flavored coffee, but it’s still pretty low on my list of would-be guinea pigs.) So I took a deep breath, armed myself with a Phillips #00 screwdriver, tiny flathead and T6 Torx, and went to work.

Really screwed

A few notes before we begin. As far as spills go, this one seemed particularly nasty. A near-full 12-ounce mug of very hot coffee (no milk or sugar) landed almost in its entirety on my laptop, and I did very little to stop its path of destruction. Not only did I not shut it down, my immediate reaction (after grabbing a boatload of paper towels and placing them unmethodically on the keyboard) was to to pull a bunch of important files over my network. When I finally shut it down a few minutes later, it performed the cycle as it should; but I didn’t turn it over or try to dry it any way until several hours later, when it was clearly too late.

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Just recently, Apple released new 13- inch  and 15-inch MacBook Pro having a feature never seen in an Apple laptop: a Secure Digital (SD) memory card reader.

The reader is handy for transferring videos and photos from a camera, but you can also use the reader with an SD Card startup disk. This is helpful for when you need to troubleshoot the MacBook Pro.

Roman Loyola of Macworld provided a video on how to create a SD card startup disk for the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros. The video can be found in their Youtube channel: Macworld. Materials needed are SD card with a capacity of at least 8GB, and the OS installation disc that came with the laptop.

Download Macworld Video #114

• Format: MPEG-4/H.264
• Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)
• Size: 11.5 MB
• Length: 4 minutes, 3 seconds

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