I needed a sonic screwdriver...

This is was a MacBook.

This is was my wife's MacBook.

This is not my wife's new MacBook Air.

This ate a disc of my Doctor Who series 1 set. And it needed punishment. xP

Or more to the point really, I needed to get the disc out, and the MacBook was dead. So what happened? ...

This poor laptop had really given up the ghost a while ago. For perhaps over a year the battery has been dead to the point it needed to be plugged in all the time. The machine itself was in a sorry state, despite my efforts to clean it up and quicken it: using it was like swimming through treacle (or at least, how I should imagine one aspect - the pace and effort - of swimming through treacle to be). My wife struggled on with it for many months that seemd longer than they needed to, until we bought her a new MacBook Air this year. This was then for the kids' use for their Mathletics - except it hardly ever got used for that, probably because it was about 3 million times more horrible than just using our iPads - or even my iMac. I've used it a couple of times recently for watching Dr Who in bed - and this, dear readers, is where the story really starts...

On Tuesday a lot of Dr Who arrived for me. This made me happy. I started watching them, which made me more happy. Last night I took a disc to watch in this old Macbook, lying in bed. All was going well. The Doctor was playing, I was enjoying, all was right in the world. Then...

Frozen. All of a sudden playback froze. Mouse pointer didn't move. Key combinations did nothing. Eject button did nothing. Totally and utterly frozen. Turned it off. Turned it back on ... well, tried to turn it back on, only to be greeted by a black screen and a verrrry loud metallic beep which just repeated over and over. Not even a synthesised friendly beep from the speakers, a harsh toneless beep emanating from the insides somewhere. And there was no booting-up.

Cue much searching online. Nothing quite like what I was experiencing. I tried everything I could find online to remove a stuck disc - including what had worked for me previously when a disc got stuck in my iMac - with no success. In fact, all that happened was that there were fewer beeps (and less optical drive whirring) before it would give up and go silent again - thereafter requiring more and longer presses of the power button to even get it to try to boot.

So. Buggered then.

Pulled out my screwdrivers to open the damn thing. Nup. Not gunna happen. Weird damn screws, which my Phillips-heads wouldn't play with. They're crosses, right enough, but so shallow that the Phillips just slips out. I had pretty much resolved to take it to the Mac fixer place in Katoomba, but my wife pointed out that it'd probably be cheaper to simply buy another set of series one. We agreed that the computer was sodded and there was no point in trying to salvage it, so I had a go at levering the case open, having managed to winkle out 3 or 4 of the screws around the outside. No dice.

Finally I found the little screwdriver thingy I got from the optician when I got my last pairs of glasses. That actually worked! Some of the screws were very tight, and with this tiny driver I couldn't get the leverage to shift them, but I got most of them, and then yanked - with the result you see here.

So, (ex-)MacBook in the bin. Hard drive removed; going to decide what to do with that, though it shouldn't have anything sensitive on it. DVD in DVD player and working fine. Quick breakfast, and off to work.

I really needed a sonic screwdriver. ;-)