Here's my funny coincidence for the week: the motherboard on my iBook bit the dust yesterday, and today they come out with a sleek new line of G4 iBooks. I mean it's bad, but, it's good.
In the mean time, I've booted a loaner iBook off my old hard drive in an external firewire case. It feels very Frankensteinian, but it ought to get me through my two talks this week.
Re:Not another one!
chromatic on 2003-10-23T17:18:14
Figure that laptops just suck, hardware wise.
Re:Not another one!
phillup on 2003-10-23T17:52:25
Well... do you want everyone to report their working macs?
Here... I have one. Last year's top of the line G4 TiBook... works like a charm... too damn slow.
But... I've not met a single processor system that isn't. It is a responsiveness thing... and, I'm sure the slower hard drive (compared to a desktop) has something to do with it too.
Point is... it just works... so, why speak up?Re:Not another one!
djberg96 on 2003-10-23T18:09:36
Yeah, but I don't recall anyone here saying, "my Dell laptop went kaput" or, "the screen on my Compaq cracked in half this morning". Not that there hasn't been one - I just don't remember ever seeing one.I also realize that this can be explained further as:
I'm wary now, that's all.
- There are a relatively high number of users of Mac laptops here on use.perl
- These users tend to use their laptops heavily
- Ergo, they die sooner and it is reported more often
Re:Not another one!
ziggy on 2003-10-23T20:09:47
When a mac works flawlessly for yet another day, it is not an exceptional event. That's why you don't hear posts like "my Dell laptop running gentoo has been up for 47 days!", eitherWhen a mac you have used for 2-4 years gives up the ghost, it's remarkable because it is so long in the tooth. When a mac you have used for 0-2 years gets hardware problems, it's remarkable because they have a reputation for lasting so very long.
Same here.
I got a second hand iBook a couple of months ago. It's "only" 600mhz, but that's plenty fast for me -- I work in a tcsh shell most of the time anyway, and it's plenty reponsive for me. The person I bought it from got it in Spain, so it's got a weird keyboard, but once I got used to that I started to see that as a feature, not a bug -- having to type by memory rather than being able to look at the keycaps is great for your touch typing abilities
But then the hard drive started getting noisy. Very noisy, like an old mechanical clock: *TICK TOCK* *TICK TOCK*. It would start doing this randomly, and then wouldn't quit doing it for anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. I actually recorded audio & video of it doing this with my Clie, thinking it would help tech support at Microcenter diagnose the problem, but it was obvious from the description that it was hard drive failure and that wasn't needed.
So I called around, and found out that most of the local computer stores either don't sell laptop drives &/or don't install them. The Apple Store would do it, but it would be $350 or so and I'd end up with the same 15gb drive that it came with. Microcenter, on the other hand, agreed to do it as an "upgrade" for $30, plus $170 for a 40gb drive, but when they realized what a pain in the butt it is to work on iBooks they jacked it up from a $30 "upgrade" to an $85 "repair". Bummer. On the bright side, the Mac tech told me that iBooks are normally shipped offsite for repair, at a rate of $420, so I was getting a deal there. I guess.
So a week later, I got the laptop back, with an bigger drive, and all was well.
For a day.
Then the cat accidentally bumped the iBook off a shelf. It landed on the hardwood floor with a loud, painful thud. The screen was open at the time. The hinges of the screen are now, well, floppy. If you open the lid, the plastic twists agonizingly; you have to carefully twist the hinges to get it to open, and the screen needs to be propped up against something or it tends to flop over.
Dammit.
The computer aspect of things still seems okay: it boots, it runs, it shuts down, it comes back on, etc. The sleep light isn't coming on when the lid is closed, but for now I'm attributing that to the messed up hinge, and in any case everything seems okay operationally -- it still seems to sleep normally, it still seems to wake up normally.
I looked up a few iBook case mods on Google, then partly dismantled the lid, and found that the hinges are attached to some kind of metal (magnesium?) ring that goes around the edge of the display. That ring is now snapped on either side of each hinge. I really don't know how to fix this -- the part looks simple enough, but is possibly exotic & therefore expensive. I'm debating trying to bond the two broken segments with epoxy or something, but I have no idea if that would be strong enough -- it seems like opening & closing the lid puts a lot of stress at the metal right there, and I don't know how strong things have to be.
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I'm getting a bit disillusioned with Apples. I mean yeah, if the machine dropped, that's abuse, and I accept that. But I've read people talking anecdotally about iBooks that have been dropped half a dozen times and somehow kept working, and this one dropped once, from two or three feet, and is in bad shape now. And the hard drive, I think, can't be called abuse.
Further, my current desktop is a dual G4, and as long as I've had it it has had power problems when booting, where the power light briefly flickers and the fan comes on, but the drives never spin up and the boot chime never sounds. This problem is transient, and the machine seems to run just fine if it gets past that point, but I've never been able to make that problem go away. The G4 tower I had before that failed when the motherboard died; the iMac I had before that died when the CRT started making scary electrical zaps before eventually failing altogether.
Four Macs I've had, and all four have had issues.
My fiancee is telling me that my next computer should be a PC if the Macs are going to keep breaking down like this. I try to argue that Macs have such a good reputation for reliability, but the track record at home is a bit more tangible & discouraging than the possibly Reality Distortion Field addled ravings of random strangers online
*sigh*
On the bright side, I've just received confirmation that my copy of OSX 10.3 has been shipped. Maybe that'll distract me for a while...
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So... Allison, your motherboard is dead, eh? What are you planning to do with the machine? Interested in selling any parts...?
