Dirt Nap

Well, it was inevitable. My trusty iBook laptop which has given me so much grief over the years (though it ran trouble-free for almost 14 months) has finally decided to take a dirt nap. It suffered a fall to the floor (not my fault this time), and has trouble booting.

I get a boot chime, and I get a grey screen, but the OS refuses to load. No Apple screen, just a blank grey screen staring back at me. So, of course I went into troubleshooting mode to figure out what I could find out. Well, I pulled out my OSX discs and attempted to boot from the optical drive and repair the hard drive. This usually cures most problems, but no dice this time. I heard the optical drive spin up and do a little reading, but I saw no feedback on the screen.

At this point I decided that I had better find a way to rescue any files that reside on the hard drive.

So I booted into target disk mode from the other laptop in the house (a first-generation MacBook) and was successful in mounting the iBook's hard drive on the MacBook. A few minutes later, and I had everything I could think of that I may need to keep from the dying machine. As an afterthought, I ran the disc utility program and repaired the hard drive on the ailing laptop.

Thinking that I may have repaired some critical damage on the hard drive, I attempted to re-boot the iBook. Again, a boot chime and grey screen, but nothing else. Running all the possibilities through my mind, I came to the conclusion that I had a failure somewhere on the video processor, or some other problem on the hardware bus that was preventing the machine from booting.

Either way the failure is on the logic board, and that only means I have one option left. Purchase a replacement logic board, or retire the laptop. Replacement logic boards are incredibly expensive, and when it comes to iBooks, logic boards are in short supply, as this is the component that usually fails in the first place. As far as eBay is concerned, purchasing a used logic board from a seller is a bit like playing Russian Roulette -- auctions for laptop components are almost always parted from dead laptops.

So the next logical thing is to say sayonara to the trusty computer. I've had the machine for over 5 years -- and it was at least 2 years old when I bought it. I've likely sunk as much as $1500 of hardware and software into the laptop -- for repairs, upgrades, etc. So where does one draw the line and refuse to sink more money into the machine? Well, that is always the definitive question. Even if it was working, the most I could get for the laptop would be $200. If I hocked a dead iBook on eBay, I'd get less that $50 for it.

I think it's time to look into a new(er) machine. One of the stipulations is that whatever machine I purchase, it must be faster and newer than the machine it replaces. Therefore if I purchase a replacement laptop, it must have at least a 1 GHz G4 processor. These machines are still sitting around the $500 mark on eBay, which I thought was a little rich, provided that G4 laptops were retired by Apple over 2 years ago.

I realize it might make a little more sense and buy a state-of-the-art laptop computer for $500 more. The other two Apples that live in this house I consider to be quite fast already -- speed isn't the issue here. The issue is the chipset that resides in older Apple machines. The G4 architecture allows me to run legacy software. Yes, I realize that I can run old software through a virtual machine -- though my experiences with virtual machines and emulation has been mediocre.

Since I spend a great deal of time working in Logic on recording projects, I do have need for state-of-the-art technology. I have had my current desktop machine for a year and a half (and it was 1 year old when I purchased it) -- so it's beginning to get a little long in the tooth. I will likely wait for another iMac revision (or 2) and see if I can upgrade to a 24" Aluminium model for $500 less than a new one, but that's a story for another time -- and in all honesty, I don't need to be in a major rush to replace that laptop.