MacBook Pro : FAIL!

To all those people who I’ve been raving about my Mac experience, I take it back!

At least for a short while…

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac, and as I sit here writing this post on a Windows machine, I morn the loss of my lovely OS X working environment. But, I’m now at the stage where my SECOND MacBook Pro in six months is ready to be taken to the doctors, the first went back within a week of purchase after the case started to warp to the point where it rocked on any flat surface, when I tried to type.

What’s wrong this time then?

I’ve been having an intermittent problem where the built-in keyboard and trackpad stop working for a short period of time. On Saturday morning I suffered 3 kernel panics in a very short period of time, and all were related to a module with a name along the lines of IOHID (Human Input Device!?!?).

I tried to do a clean install of Leopard, hoping that the problem might be software related. I suffered a further KP during the install process however whilst using the keyboard and from then on both the keyboard and trackpad were unresponsive.

So, now I’ve got an appointment at my nearest Genius Bar. (Which I’m going to have to take an afternoon off work to go to..)

Has anybody else experienced anything like this? I know that there have been a number of cases where people have lost the built in k/b and trackpad. My friend has had it happen twice to the same machine* two different machines this year! *(Tom tells me that it’s actually the same / a similar problem on two different MBPs as opposed to a re-occurrence on the same machine… I’m not sure what’s worse…)

Oh yeah, I think that this case is starting to warp too…

UPDATE:

I’ve just noticed something even stranger!

I’ve been using a USB keyboard and mouse to try and make sure that I’ve got Windows friendly copies of all my data and I accidentally started to use the built-in keyboard… It worked!

But then it stopped!

It turns out that both the keyboard and trackpad work if I keep one finger on the trackpad. As soon as I release the trackpad the keyboard stops working fairly quickly, and if I happen to be holding down a key (e.g. changing the volume or brightness) I get a KP!

UPDATE 2:

Curious about people’s woes with swollen batteries on the MacBook Pros, I decided to remove the battery to see if the problem went away… well, something happened… not even the ‘one finger’ trick works when the battery isn’t there! The battery looks fine, but it must be exerting some pressure for it to have an effect.