It's Alive! (a.k.a. Look at What I Have Created!)

The beginnings of this weblog came in the wake of a disaster that rendered my iBook inoperative. You may root through the archives to see all I have written about said incident, but the posts are far too many to mention, and I do not have the time, nor energy to find all relevant posts in my archives.

19 months. That's how long it has taken me to bring the road apple back to life. Now, this has not been a continuous effort; there were times I had given up on my little machine. But off and on, I gave it a little TLC, and a few hard-earned bucks, and tonight was the first time that the iBook sprung to life on its' own in ages.

And it's a completely different machine now. It has more RAM, it has more video RAM, the bus is much faster, and the clock speed is 300 MHz faster. It's a maxed out machine, and the only thing it is missing, is a combo drive (CD-RW, DVD ROM) -- which is something I don't need, as I have a superdrive on my iMac.

So what am I going to use my new (old) toy for? Wireless surfing and blogging from the couch, teaching students over the internet via WiFi, mobile recording; the possibilities are limitless.

I have to admit I'm a little smug in my own ingenuity. I am not a Apple certified technician, and it was a hair-raising experience. This was a delicate operation, and not one that I would recommend anyone try. It also took a fair amount of monetary investment, not to mention time, to get it up and running.

The problem was a compound one. In other words, there were two faulty parts that caused the demise of my laptop. There was a faulty inverter board which caused a blank screen, as well as a faulty logic board, which explained why I could not connect by iBook to an external monitor. Sadly, many iBooks suffer from logic board failure, as the design was flawed (from what my research tells me). Along the lines, my hard drive got corrupted at a boot sector, which is the reason why it stopped booting. Thank the maker for target disk mode and Disk First Aid, as it allowed me to repair the drive, and allow it to boot for the first time in nearly a year.

I expect many future posts to originate from my little iBook, and I thank everyone whom I have consulted advice from the last 19 months.