Bev and I took last week off to rest up. Just day trips and the usual "winterize" the house deal. I had ordered two batts for the Tungsten E's we have. One of them used to be Tim's. Anyway, we had not used them in awhile because the batts were old and never held the charge long. I got the new one's in and soldered them onto the boards so we are now reacquainted with Tungsten E land.
One of the day trips was to Small Dog Electronics in Waitsfield VT. Bev gets me a gift certificate there every year for Christmas or Birthday so I had that burning a hole for a while now. I picked up a 100gig HD to replace the 30gig the iBook G4 came with and a firewire enclosure for the 30gigger I was pulling. Dropped the cash for a 1gig RAM stick and had a great afternoon in Waitsfield. The 30gig drive I had was way too small and I could not upgrade to 10.5 without some head room. The guy at the store asked me if I realized what was involved in replacing the HD on an iBook and I said yeah. Steve Jobs had his head up his arse when he designed the thing. You basically have to strip down the entire laptop to get to the HD. About 30 screws later the HD was in. I loaded the 30 gigger into the firewire enclosure and did a fresh install of 10.4 and used the migration tool to carry over all my old apps, network settings, and personal files. Worked like a charm. Then I checked the 1Gig stick I put in and saw it was only seeing half the stick. I rebooted a couple of times and was able to get it to see the whole stick but then 2 min. later the system would crash. Called the store and got an RMA. The new stick came in yesterday and the iBook screams now.
I noticed a small magnet on the underside of the keyboard that I had to pull to get at a screw. The magnet is on the upper part of the keyboard near the hinge for the monitor. I was wondering what the hell it was for and today found out that the monitor goes out when you close the lid via a reed valve in the monitor lid. The magnet opens the reed when the lid comes down near it. Neat.
David
