Recently, I had the problem that the TFT display module of an 2008 17″ Intel iMac refused to work properly: The whole image was inverted and the right half stayed completely grey. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I came across the problem that I needed to use a MacBook with our multi-touch table the Virttable.

Therefore, the screen of the MacBook must be enhanced onto a video projector that has been attached to the DVI port and this projector must be the primary screen. Anyway, Windows did not offer to me to select this projector as the primary screen. The only option was to extend the MacBook’s desktop to it. As I need to run the Touchlib’s config app on the Virttable this demands the video projector to be the primary screen.

It seems like the NVIDIA chip built into the MacBook does support this feature but somehow it is not mentioned in the driver’s inf file and because of that it is not possible to set an external monitor as primary screen in the display properties under Windows XP with this NVIDIA mobile GPU chip.

However, there is a project called laptopvideo2go, which aims to solve this problem with NVIDIA mobile GPU chips.

I needed to download this modded inf file and this driver archive.

Finally, I followed this illustrated installation process.

Today I have made an interesting discovery: my 2008 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro is using frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) for the illumination of its keyboard.

The background to this discovery is that I spilled a bit of salad dressing into my keyboard and since then some of my keys are not working reliable anymore. To be more precise: Some keys I must push two or three times until they produce the letter. Thus, I wanted to look if I could clean the keyboard and what kind of keyboard I would need if I wanted to replace it. I used the MBP iFixit guide to achieve the disassembly (and as I have been a lucky guy also the reassembly).

Anyway, when I removed the keyboard compartment from the MBP’s body I discovered that it consisted of four parts:

MacBook Pro Keyboard Parts