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Feb. 20th, 2005 07:14 pmLiz is up at her parent's place tonight since her brother and sister are coming back from NZ and so she can take her sister to uni tomorrow, so here I am LJ'ing :)
Yesterday was mostly mac geekery. My cousin Steve's ibook was no longer booting, and his parents iMac's modem fried in a thunderstorm.. I managed to find another modem, so I put that in. I also got his iBook working again, but alas it is not long for this world. They're buying him a new ibook or possible 12 inch powerbook, and giving me the old one.. w00t free ibook :D
However it's not all roses.. the optical drive is screwed, as are the trackpad and the speakers, and I don't entirely trust the NVRAM or the hard drive. The trackpad never worked properly, but it's now all dead. In attempting to fix the optical drive, I had to remove the top case.. to remove the top case requires removing a cable from the trackpad.. as I went to remove it, I noticed the socket was loose.. like, not entirely attached to the motherboard.. I tried very carefully to remove the cable from the socket, however the small amount of lateral force applied while I was pushing the socket down was enough to rip the socket off the motherboard.. EEP! Further, upon trying to remove the speaker cable from the motherboard, two of the pins came with it, so now the audio is screwed. I was careful, and I've done this sort of thing before without destroying motherboards. My theory is that the bits were never soldered on properly. I'm also not overly thrilled with how difficult it is to remove the keyboard.. if that came off, things would be all bad. The optical drive's problems seem to be due to a fundamental design flaw, so I wasn't able to fix it.. sigh. But it's not all bad.. I know people who for an appropriate, yet small sum of money will resolder these connectors back onto the motherboard, so I should be able to get it working again. The guides from pbfixit.com are handy.
Anyway, put it all back together and it still works. The trackpad problems were so bad that steve never actually used it, so the fact it now definately doesn't work isn't a big deal for him, and he has the sound turned off or using headphones most of the time anyway, so no problem there either.. I gave it all back to him and he'll transfer everything over and let me know when it's ready to pick up. I don't know what I'm going to do with it in the long term.. I've pondered, as many of you know, getting an 8.4inch LCD and putting it inside a colour classic case with the guts of an iBook, however I'm not sure of if I want to do that with this one, or if it's worth it :) Other plans include a digital photo frame. Alternatively, a new 30GB HDD, Laptop Combo drive and logic board repairs will set me back about $350.. but I'm not sure I want to spend the 3 hours removing the logic board.. Alternatively, (yet again), I want to upgrade the HDD in this Powerbook to 100GB.. which would give a spare 80GB drive.. I could then put that into Liz's iBook.. and put the 30GB from that into the old iBook, and grab a spare CD-ROM laptop drive I've seen floating around.. but.. well, Liz and I's laptops are under warranty, and I'm not sure I want to know how much it will cost to get Apple to change them, and I would kinda like the ibook to play DVDs :>
Today I drove into the city with Liz. Yes, *I* drove. Amazing yes? Managed not to die, which is always good. Whilst in the city, I bought Liz her birthday present, which was a boatload of Manga and Volume 4 of Azumanga Daioh on DVD. Also whilst in city, bought self new shorts, and looked at TVs. Plasmas are just a bit too expensive/crap still :/ But they are coming down in price, which is good, but the $2700 plasmas REALLY suck. Also HDD+DVDR thingies are under $800 now, but I don't know if they'ld work as niftyly as our current one does. WHICH STILL ISN'T FIXED! GRR. Ahem, sorry.
Anyway, that's my geeky goings-on lately.
Yesterday was mostly mac geekery. My cousin Steve's ibook was no longer booting, and his parents iMac's modem fried in a thunderstorm.. I managed to find another modem, so I put that in. I also got his iBook working again, but alas it is not long for this world. They're buying him a new ibook or possible 12 inch powerbook, and giving me the old one.. w00t free ibook :D
However it's not all roses.. the optical drive is screwed, as are the trackpad and the speakers, and I don't entirely trust the NVRAM or the hard drive. The trackpad never worked properly, but it's now all dead. In attempting to fix the optical drive, I had to remove the top case.. to remove the top case requires removing a cable from the trackpad.. as I went to remove it, I noticed the socket was loose.. like, not entirely attached to the motherboard.. I tried very carefully to remove the cable from the socket, however the small amount of lateral force applied while I was pushing the socket down was enough to rip the socket off the motherboard.. EEP! Further, upon trying to remove the speaker cable from the motherboard, two of the pins came with it, so now the audio is screwed. I was careful, and I've done this sort of thing before without destroying motherboards. My theory is that the bits were never soldered on properly. I'm also not overly thrilled with how difficult it is to remove the keyboard.. if that came off, things would be all bad. The optical drive's problems seem to be due to a fundamental design flaw, so I wasn't able to fix it.. sigh. But it's not all bad.. I know people who for an appropriate, yet small sum of money will resolder these connectors back onto the motherboard, so I should be able to get it working again. The guides from pbfixit.com are handy.
Anyway, put it all back together and it still works. The trackpad problems were so bad that steve never actually used it, so the fact it now definately doesn't work isn't a big deal for him, and he has the sound turned off or using headphones most of the time anyway, so no problem there either.. I gave it all back to him and he'll transfer everything over and let me know when it's ready to pick up. I don't know what I'm going to do with it in the long term.. I've pondered, as many of you know, getting an 8.4inch LCD and putting it inside a colour classic case with the guts of an iBook, however I'm not sure of if I want to do that with this one, or if it's worth it :) Other plans include a digital photo frame. Alternatively, a new 30GB HDD, Laptop Combo drive and logic board repairs will set me back about $350.. but I'm not sure I want to spend the 3 hours removing the logic board.. Alternatively, (yet again), I want to upgrade the HDD in this Powerbook to 100GB.. which would give a spare 80GB drive.. I could then put that into Liz's iBook.. and put the 30GB from that into the old iBook, and grab a spare CD-ROM laptop drive I've seen floating around.. but.. well, Liz and I's laptops are under warranty, and I'm not sure I want to know how much it will cost to get Apple to change them, and I would kinda like the ibook to play DVDs :>
Today I drove into the city with Liz. Yes, *I* drove. Amazing yes? Managed not to die, which is always good. Whilst in the city, I bought Liz her birthday present, which was a boatload of Manga and Volume 4 of Azumanga Daioh on DVD. Also whilst in city, bought self new shorts, and looked at TVs. Plasmas are just a bit too expensive/crap still :/ But they are coming down in price, which is good, but the $2700 plasmas REALLY suck. Also HDD+DVDR thingies are under $800 now, but I don't know if they'ld work as niftyly as our current one does. WHICH STILL ISN'T FIXED! GRR. Ahem, sorry.
Anyway, that's my geeky goings-on lately.
