by 
You learn a lot after four months of working at a tech shop window.
Between October of 2012 and February of 2013, I was part of the University of California Berkeley’s tech repair window staff. The Apple certifications had been earned, the time had been put in, and it was time to see if a geek who pretty much lived to tinker with Macs could help the university’s 38,000-plus student body with whatever disasters happened—especially at the 11th hour with everything due at once.
The tech window is gone now (swept away as part of a mandatory building renovation and moved to a smaller store across the street), but over the course of more than 200 repairs for the wearied and panicked tides that crashed the tech shop window, I figured that there were three incredibly common Mac problems that you can easily fix yourself or at least limit the damage.
Click…click…click
That clicking noise from your Mac is probably the hard drive, the most-used component in your computer with the most moving parts, so there’s a higher likelihood that it’s going to fail. But it’s the one thing you don’t want to fail, since it stores all the work you’ve done. So, we’d get the drive out of the computer, plug it into a USB or FireWire external casing, and then hook that unit up to a known-good Mac.
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