I came across a blog entry just slamming Apple hardware for being faulty, and immediately wrote it off as a pissed off, overly-opinionated rant that had no grounds in reality. Then about two hours later, my MacBook Pro began making a noise like a race car engine. When a laptop sounds like it’s about to burn rubber and tear off around the corner, you know something is seriously wrong. I was exactly one month out of warranty and my laptop’s cooling fans just died. Mild distress set in which eventually turned to disappointment, then just plain anger. I decided to take apart my machine to try and fix it myself, which led to three good lessons:

1. smcFanControl is a great application that lets you manually control the fan speed of you Macintosh computer, allowing you to manage heat.
2. Ifixit has a fantastic guide on how to take apart your MacBook Pro and install new parts. Use it.
3. If you can’t get the casing off your laptop at 3:00 in the morning after having 4 beers, shut your machine down, take it to the Apple store the next day, and they will fix it for free even if you are outside the warranty period.

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