The state of our Brent is bad and weak. Three days ago Brent fell prey to a marauding bug of some sort, and for two of those days he suffered exxtreme nasal discharge and full-on post-nasal drip. The pain of his condition warranted putting him into a medically-induced coma using a combination of Benadryl (the original theory being that it was allergies, not illness) and NyQuil (the revised theory being illness).

One or the other normally knocks Brent out; the combination enabled him to enter a coma-like status far into the following day.

ProTip: do not do this! It was actually quite stupid of me, even accidentally.

Today Brent’s nose finally stuffed up, but he developed a solid cough and an extreme susceptibility to dizziness in its place. Consequently, he merely observed during his dance class this evening.

…

The world did not stay still while Brent was out for the count, however. No! In a cruel twist of fate, the MacBook that actually arrived (!) appears to suffer from overheating that results in the processor scaling back before it even reaches its rated clock speed. That’s right: when this MacBook is put under load (while plugged in and set to maximize performance), it frequently fails to actually run at the 2.0 GHz that it’s advertised to run at.

The only program that is known to report the current speed of the processor, a program called CoreDuoTemp, isn’t Apple-provided software. Consequently, Apple’s not willing to trust anything it says (which is understandable, if not frustrating)—despite the fact that there are MacBook owners out there who claim that their MacBooks can run at full speed under load for extended periods of time, measuring with the same program.

Brent’s only hope of getting a MacBook that runs at its purported speed (assuming, of course, that CoreDuoTemp is reporting the speed accurately) is now to make a trek to the nearest retail Apple Store, compare his MacBook to the store’s models (hopefully demonstrating a difference between them), and bitch and moan until they swap his machine to shut him up.

Sounds like fun for all involved, eh? Brent’s not sure that he’s up to it.