laptop

This news is a pain because it effects my PowerBook's battery. It is not the original battery that came with the computer but one I bought six months ago. Unfortunately due to the number of batteries recalled it looks like Apple's support website has gone down too.

My Powerbook had to go in to the Apple Store for repairs on Wednesday. The initial estimate was in the order of a week to get a new logic board installed. I was very pleased when on Friday I received a phone call to say that it was ready to pick up. Two days turnaround is pretty good especially considering parts had to be couriered in (presumably from Auckland). I was thankful that I had purchased the three year AppleCare plan when I bought the laptop a year and a half ago else the repairs would have set me back a lot of money.

Its been a day for breakages today. Firstly last night my PowerBook began to slow down and when I did I system profile only half of its memory was registering. After testing the individual memory modules successfully I put the RAM back into the machine and everything came back up as normal. I was hoping the problem was solved but then this morning the laptop froze with what looked like a kernel panic.
After rebooting only half the memory was visible again which was a sign of definite motherboard problems. Fortunately I had invested in a 3-year AppleCare protection plan when I bought the machine so it was just a case of backing everything up and taking it down the road to the local Apple Centre.

I formatted my hard drive today and repartitioned it with space for OSX and Ubuntu. Originally I planned on putting in a larger hard disk but cracking open an aluminium PowerBook is like tackling a lobster with a butter knife.
Ubuntu installed effortlessly on the machine with very little input from myself. I was even surprised to find my Apple bluetooth mouse works without having to do anything. Apparently the wireless will not work but that is because the wireless manufacturer uses a closed source driver.

If you are the owner of an older Powerbook then iScroll is perfect for you. It provides the advanced trackpad functionality of new Powerbooks like two finger horizontal and verical scrolling and a few other tricks as well. The free utility can be downloaded from here:

iScroll2 Download Page