The current weather in Berlin simply sucks. It does not help that its even worse in Hamburg or Amsterdam (where I will go again end of week). I live in perpetual fear that the climate catastrophe will leave Berlin with a scifi-dystopy default weather: 3 to 10 degrees celsius, grey sky and light rain. You know, the classic weather from end-of-world movies.
Upgrading my Mac OS X brought a number of interesting pleasures. Faster overall feeling, Exposé and some other niceties. One thing really hurts: uControl does not work. I use uControl to remap the keys on the external IBM buckling spring keyboard (those mighty classic keyboards that make a serious noise and have the right typing resistance). Since the IBM has a PS/2 connector I needed an adaptor. Previously I used the extraordinary well designed Y-Mouse from P.I. Engineering. Since I somehow misplaced the thing a while ago, I am currently using some its-cheap-and-from-china-copycat adapter that does the basic job, but misses all the quality of the Y-Mouse. The most serious problem: it has no internal key-remapping. As a Mac-user your most frequently used key is Command (also called Apple). Since the IBM keyboard has no such key and also no Windows key (its from way before that time), the only choice is to remap Alt to Command and use the Alt key on the Powerbook keyboard. Not an optimal solution, but a workable one. And to use the cheap adaptor I needed uControl to do this remapping. Anyway, it will be weeks until uControl works again, so I need to find that Y-Mouse tonight.
After a while the harddisk in my old Tangerine iBook got a bit to small (no wonder at 3GB) and to noisy. So I ventured to replace it with a less vintage 20G Toshiba disk. Unfortunately Apple has removed ftp access to the Service Manuals and I had heard that putting a new harddisk into a original iBook is a rather arduous task, so I wanted to get some help from a howto or a manual.
After google spit out the Service Manual (thanks to Tim who blogs at The Lunatc Fringe ), to my astonishement all it had to say about take-apart was this: "Take Apart procedures are not available for iBook." Great.
Some further search finaly ended up at Caslis , and this page finaly gave me an impression what kind of task I had before me.
Two hours later the iBook is now again assembled, the new harddisk installed. No screws left, it boots and everything seems fine. I had some strange effect with the CD-ROM. At first it declined to accept burned CDs. After I inserted a normal CD it took a while and some noises (recalibration?) to read it, but now everything seems to be fine.
In addition to the hints given at the page, some recommendations if you want to try the procedure yourself:
- get good light, all the necessary screwdrivers and pliers and a clean desk to work on
- try to remember what kind of screw goes into what hole. There are about 4 different kinds and lenghts and it saves a lot of work on reassembly
- make sure when re-attaching the display that the small transparent plastik hooks protruding from the lower shell are correctly fitted into the display-hinge
- be very carefull when unpluging and replugging cables, especially for trackpad, keyboard, display and harddisk. Use a small fine screwdriver to gently lift he plug.
- dont try it of you tend to break the things that you disassemble, there is a lot of stuff that can get wrong
All in all, the interior of the old iBooks is just sick. The service costs must be astronomic, you need to even detach the display to get to the harddisk. I have never seen anything this unfriendly to user self service. Anyway, it can be done, its just lengthy and tiresome.