Following up with parts 3, 2, and 1 - I finally received my replacement TruePower battery from FastMac.  I can honestly say I probably wouldn’t have this battery by now if it hadn’t been for me E-mailing the utter crap out FastMac.  Let me recap just in case you missed something, or if you’d rather not read all 3 parts.  Back in June of 2009 I had an issue with a MacBook Pro battery from FastMac. The battery lost all of it’s cycles, dropped it’s charge, and then came back to life. When the battery came back to life, several cells died, they became swollen and dead. This resulted in an unbelievable amount of power loss.  I contacted FastMac to get a replacement since I was under warranty.  This was in the last two weeks of June.  They told me there would be a back-order until the beginning of July 2009, roughly three weeks, FastMac informed me. This was fine with me. I was out of town, so two weeks went by. I shipped the package out, they received the package one week after I had shipped it.  This was the cap of the three week waiting period.  So I expected a quick turn around and to have my battery replaced shortly.

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^ here’s an ugly image for a ugly situation.

Following up with part 2 of the battery fiasco.  I have not had any luck contacting FastMac by e-mail.  There have not been any updates about the whereabouts of the replacement battery  since my last post. FastMac hasn’t contacted me since writing part 2.  I called FastMac today to see what’s going on.  They actually answered!  FastMac told me they are expecting a shipment in the first week(s) of September.  The fellow that I spoke with said it could be as early as this week. I, for one, highly doubt it.  We’ll give them the benifit of the doubt though. I know this post really is not anything more than a status update.  I thought I would let you all know the status of the battery as of today.

Technically there’s not really a pt.1 to this post. For the sake of discussion we’ll refer to the review I posted on December 20th 2008 as part 1. I am having yet another issue with the FastMac batteries. In my review I praised FastMac for being very punctual and generally on the ball with everything.

After writing the review, some folks left comments expressing some concern about FastMac’s service. I defended FastMac at first. Sometimes one or two bad transactions happen. Now that I have done more research, my views have changed. The stories from the comments are starting to hit pretty close to home.

If you recall back in December 2008 when I wrote the review I just had a MacBook Pro battery replaced by FastMac because the one I had purchased in October of 2008 mysteriously died after only having it for two weeks. I thought at first the issue was due to me neglecting the battery while it sat on my desk with a 36% charge.  Now I think that was not the case at all. I firmly believe it is due to the batteries being cheaply made.  The reason I have changed my views are because I am currently in the process of replacing yet another FastMac Truepower battery. Read the rest of this entry »

After purchasing a MacBook, I discovered that I didn’t have a proper case to carry my new computer around in and I didn’t feel like shelling out lots of money for one. So I decided to sit down at my mother’s sewing machine (one so technologically advanced that I had to read the instruction manual to find out how to make it go) and make one for myself. I rooted through my fabric stash and found some fabric that I liked and asked my mom if she had any fabric I could use as well. I ended up picking a cotton fabric for the inside and a smoother, more decorative fabric for the outside, both of which are black.

inside fabric:

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