At the time of writing the laptop will not boot, but instead the fans spin with no display output. I understand the issue to be the solder on the graphics processor that has failed, a company named Retronix in Scotland offered to repair it for around £80, but I don’t have time to wait for it, I need a laptop for work! The RAM has been upgraded from the standard 2GB to 4GB of 800MHZ Kingston memory.

Good points:
- Casing is in excellent condition for the two years of use, no dints, other than some very minor scuffs it’s perfect!
- Upgraded to 4GB RAM, it flies at Photoshop or pretty much anything!
- Battery was replaced just under 9 months ago, still offers the expected 5 hours of battery life
- This was the multi-touch model of the MacBook Pro, the last one made before the switch to the new unibody style
- I chose the LED backlit matte screen option, so it’s perfect for photo editing
- Just the one owner, me, who’s been very careful with the laptop, and it’s very rarely left the (non-smoking) house
- Comes in original box with power supply, install CDs and the original DVI-VGA adapter in unused condition

Known problems:
- You need to have a folded post-it note just under the battery, otherwise the keyboard can stop working occasionally. It’s not a big problem, just something to remember to replace should you remove the battery (this is a very common issue)
- There’s a tiny slightly lighter spot in the bottom corner of the screen, not really noticeable, but worth pointing out
- For a while now the fans have seemed to run a little faster than usual, this is probably because of the dodgy GPU solder
- Of course, the fact that it doesn’t always turn on! Though of course Retronix are offering to fix this, I can put the winning bidder in touch with them.

Please see here for the list of specs:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/stats/macbook-pro-core-2-duo-2.4-15-early-2008-penryn-specs.html

UPDATE: The MacBook has sold for £410.

Also selling a Sigma 18 – 200 mm lens, Canon fit:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260600018137

I had configured my domain’s DNS servers to use freedns.afraid.org, which in turn pointed to the ukhost4u account. Sure, this adds an extra layer of requests to the loading time, but when the hosting goes down, all I had to do was import the latest database backup on my home server, flip the DNS records to my own ip at freedns, and my site was back online with minimal downtime. Slightly annoyingly after that work, ukhost4u’s customer service turned out to be excellent, and we had the issue resolved in a couple of hours. Now I just need to swap the DNS records back again…