OBITUARY: After a prolonged battle with Mac OS X, Helvetica — along with younger cousin Helvetica Neue — was finally pronounced dead on October 28, 2007 with the release of Leopard, by Apple, in California.

For years, print-based graphic designers and prepress professionals have fought to replace certain Mac OS X default fonts with their existing PostScript Type 1 fonts of the same name — Helvetica being a primary example.

It’s been a losing battle.

Now with Leopard, the war for control of Helvetica is done, and Mac OS X won.

Over the last week we’ve had a lot of Apple laptops in our office for various repairs and upgrades — including one of our own MacBook Pros that was upgraded with a larger internal hard drive.

It is a good reminder that however skilled you are at hardware repair, you won’t be able to open a MacBook Pro case without the right set of screwdrivers. We’ve asked Creativetechs’ hardware guru, Jasson Lewellen, to compile a list of tools and training materials for people who are interested in doing basic Apple laptop repair.

So whether you run an IT team headed towards self-service, or you are an intrepid DIY home-user willing to void a warranty, here are a collection of links for you to start building your own laptop repair toolkit.

If you suspect that fonts are causing problems in your applications, an easy troubleshooting step is deleting your Mac’s font caches.

We’ve covered font cache problems before in our Garbled Fonts Troubleshooting Guide — which delves into font problems more deeply. However we did overlook a quick and easy method to delete font cache files.