Yay, My MacBook Pro is Back…With a Catch
Posted on 03 March 2008, at 9:11 pm, by Mitchell Oke
For several months I have needed to take my MacBook Pro in for repair. Some of you may remember the ExpressCard that melted inside my MBP, due to a faulty motherboard. I’ve also noticed an increasing amount of grey pixels on my display, very annoying during normal use, and even more so when editing photos and video.
Finally managed to sever myself from it for a week, dropping it in last Tuesday. Was told it would be ready for pickup this morning, but that I would need to drop it back tomorrow because instead of a new screen, Apple had helpfully sent them a new optical drive!
Very annoying, but the repair centre is only a few minutes by train from my university, so it’s not that bad.
Have to say it is nice to be able to use the ExpressCard slot! Shortly after the slot went mental, the Novatel XU870 HSDPA modem arrived! Took it for a spin this morning, mmm, sweet sweet HSDPA 
Look how fast it is!
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March 4th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Mitchell - Curious what your Expresscard Modem clocks in for speed?
On Verizon the highest I’ve measured at speedtest.net is about 1.5mb. The connection is a pretty reliable 400-500k even when signal strength is weaker.
More typically it’s 800k to 1.2mb.
I consider these speeds good — albeit on the lower end of what I’d dreamed of.
In the US it seems that AT&T has a bit faster speeds but their 3G is not fully rolled out in my state.
March 4th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Well today I am seeing speeds of around 1Mbit, but yesterday it hovered around 600-800kbit.
I have to say I love that the drivers are integrated into Mac OS X, all I had to do was drop the card in and I was able to set it up immediately. Only problem is there is no settings box to specify the bands you want to use (I always set my phones to UMTS only).
March 4th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Just ran a test on that speed site you used, and WOW! Got a speed of 1.8Mbit and 357kbit. According to my carriers website I should be seeing speeds between 600kbit and 1.5mbit, which I surpassed by 20%!
And the max upload speed of this connection is supposed to be 384kbit, only slightly faster than my test!
March 4th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
That’s a great speed Mitchell. If you move around a bit with it, let me know what you get in various locations.
The best that I’ve seen Verizon in Connecticut do is a little over 1.5mb.
I do have to say that Verizon Wireless is pretty reliable though (one reason that I decided to keep it). I’ve never had a problem connecting up or losing connection. I don’t think they’re the fastest here in the US , but they make up for it (imho) with reliability.
I use a T-Mobile WIFI Hotspot account as a backup — and that rings in at a consisten 1.2mb speed which I suspect they somehow have capped to discourage heavy file sharers from nursing a latte all day while leaching files…