Tag: PowerBook

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Received the replacement battery for the PowerBook yesterday. It was shipped out via DHL, with a prepaid return label for shipping the old battery back via regular mail.

Last night I drained the old battery, plugged the new one in, and packaged up the recalled one in the box. At lunch today I went to the post office to send it off.

As I was walking up the steps, I remembered the “Does this package contain anything liquid, explosive, or otherwise hazardous?” question that postal clerks are required to ask. If you’re mailing a defective battery that could theoretically burst into flames, how exactly are you supposed to answer?

I figured it would be best not to joke about it.

As it was, I just said it was a laptop battery straight out, so the question didn’t come up.

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I’ve been thinking about adding memory to the PowerBook for a while now, and for various other reasons we ended up at Fry’s last night. I figured, we’re here anyway, why not at least price the RAM?

Well, here’s a big fragging “Why Not:” I couldn’t remember the exact specs required. There was, however, a chart listing various laptop models, and the employees could look up requirements by model in the computer. The problem there was that I knew it as “the new 12″ PowerBook G4,” not as “Model A1010,” so they ended up (as near as I can tell) pulling up the specs for last year’s PowerBook (the 1 GHz instead of the 1.33 GHz). Naturally, the two models use different kinds of RAM.

When we got home last night, I cracked open the manual to compare the specs. Tonight, I waded through the Fry’s return line, and this time I brought the manual along — as I’d intended to do in the first place.

Everything went smoothly except for one glitch. The memory slot is covered by a panel with four size #0 Phillips head screws. I do have a size #0 screwdriver, and three of the screws came out easily. One of them refused to move, and the head ended up getting stripped somewhat. Eventually I was able to get it.

So, now the laptop has gone from having the smallest amount of memory at 256 MB (barring the ancient Mac clone in the closet) to having the most memory of all our computers at 1.25 GB.

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A few weeks ago I noticed that our network hub was getting disturbingly hot, so I started turning off the power strip when we weren’t home. After returning from San Diego, the first time we turned the computers back on, the hub started buzzing. However, it stopped after a few seconds.

So I should have thought of the hub immediately when the network started acting up today.

I had been on and off the computer and the net all morning with no noticeable problems, and Katie had been on for just a few minutes when it stopped loading websites. Continue reading →

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It looks like it wasn’t quite the perfect time I thought to order a PowerBook. I received confirmation today from TerraSoft that the delay is due to the changes in the PowerBook line (which were half the reason I chose now to order it). It seems they’re still waiting for a shipment from Apple!

Presumably they had some in stock when they updated their store, in which case this is probably a good thing: it means not only are the new PowerBooks selling faster than expected, but they’re selling well through a Linux shop!

That said, if I have to wait too long I may just cancel this order and drive down to the Apple store. Of course, then I’d have to deal with repartitioning and trying to set up dual booting myself, and not only is it more complicated than dual-booting a PC*, there’s a lot less information available.

Ah, well.

* In particular, I don’t know of any utilities like Partition Magic or Parted that will allow you to resize an active Mac OS filesystem, so I would have to wipe the disk and reinstall Mac OS along with installing Linux.