I've been limping along with my iBook for close to two months now. The problem with the screen getting dark spots is annoying but not critical. The problem with the latch not latching is more of an annoyance, but also borderline cosmetic.
Usually I keep one battery in the iBook. I use it until it's drained and then recharge it. The last few laptops I've bought I've made sure to get a second battery and a second power supply. (Apple is being ridiculous though; a second power supply is a nice convenience and certainly worth $20. Why Apple is charging $70 for an iBook power supply is beyond me, and certainly not worth paying for, unless I lose the one I've got.)
Today, I remembered to bring my spare (fully charged) battery with me today, because I'd be using my iBook untethered for more than 3 hours.
Something happened, and I don't know exactly what. But ever since I changed batteries this afternoon, my iBook crashes at random, usually within the first 15 minutes after it wakes from sleep or starts cold. (It's even crashed on boot or failed to boot with no diagnostic messages whatsoever.)
Through a process of deduction (i.e. pure guesswork), I see that there's something wonky when the iBook is running off of battery or with a battery inserted. At first, it looked like the spare battery was a little goofy. So I started running the machine off of AC, and everything works perfectly. But just as soon as I put the "good" battery in, the machine crashed again. (Symptoms: it becomes unresponsive and it looks like something is goofing around with screen memory.)
This iBook is going in for repairs tomorrow. Everything's backed up, and the replacement laptop is finally configured and ready to go.
Update: The problem is definitely electrical in nature. After a few hours, the iBook exhibited the same crash-and-burn behavior when running off of AC with no battery. The last few times it crashed, using the mouse, keyboard, USB or FireWire ports seemed to trigger a crash. I did manage to boot the machine one last time (with a battery charging, no less) and back up everything via ssh. Nothing jostled the computer from the time I hit the power until the time I pressed the shutdown button on the login panel -- and no crash. ;-)
