iBook pros and cons
I recently changed laptops. I've been using various Dell laptops for the past two years, and various Toshiba laptops since 1996 (Librettos and Sat Pros). All these laptops have had a few things in common: Intel CPU's, an various versions of Microsoft operating systems and Linux. That all changed a month ago. I was at a convention outside Little Rock, AR and bought an iBook off of some guy that said it was dead. I paid $20 for it. I figured the power adaptor was worth much more than that on eBay. I get home and boot it off the installation media include, an OS X 10.2 install cd. For an eMac. It boots to some low resolution shrunken display and can't find a hard drive to install to. I figure there is some kind of problem and boot it off an OS 9.2 cd I had laying around. Boots fine and still can't find the hard drive. Why can't it find the hard drive you wonder? Well so did I. So I opened the fucker up. Opening an iBook is about as much fun as being ass raped by a 7' black man in prison. Apple doesn't design stuff to ever be opened. It took a while, but I got the god damned thing apart. Problem: I couldn't locate the hard drive either. There was a 2.5"x4" or so cavity that looked like where a hard drive would go, so I looked around and sure enough that was an IDE ribbon cable laying next to the empty spot. Luckily, I had a spare P4 Dell with a 30gig hard drive I could rip out.
Manufactured a hard drive caddy with a piece of metal and some jb weld along with some screws from a Leupold scope mount :|. Booted off the shitty eMac restore CD and presto, I had a hard drive. Still had no mouse response, so I hunted around and sure enough the trackpad's ribbon cable had slipped off. I installed OS X 10.2 with the eMac cd, and it kept it's horribly small cryptic display resolution and refused to take up the whole display. bleh, fucking resore cd's. Then, after I installed, I ran System Update and when it got to the the 10.2.8 combined update it restarted. w00t. The OS X grey bootup screen appeared. And filled the entire display. I had a working iBook.
A Month later - I love it.
Instantly added applications: Firefox, iTerm (a much better terminal program), BitchX, GLQuake (networking support is wonderful)
Good things -
Almost NO crashes
Almost NO spyware
Great form-factor
Battery lasts 5+ hours
Built-in Optical audio-out jack
Built-in Firewire and DVI
Built-in 56k and 100bt Ethernet
Cons:
Requires Overpriced Airport card for WIFI (Mac Compliant USB adaptors are even few and far between and overpriced)
Light-Up Apple - Lights up when LCD backlight is on. Also allows sun and bright light to shine through and have a super-imposed apple watermark in the background. Maybe I'm too OCD, but this bothered me a tiny amount.
DVD/CD-RW drive refuses to read DVD+R media. Works fine with DVD-R, but no +R
Memory Configuration - Has 128mb onboard and a 256mb DIMM. Why can't it have two DIMMs? I will probably end up sticking a 512mb or 1024mb stick in it, but I'd rather have 512+256 than 512+128. Or I could go for 512+512 :D.
That's pretty much it. It's a great laptop, and it's becoming my favorite and most used.
Manufactured a hard drive caddy with a piece of metal and some jb weld along with some screws from a Leupold scope mount :|. Booted off the shitty eMac restore CD and presto, I had a hard drive. Still had no mouse response, so I hunted around and sure enough the trackpad's ribbon cable had slipped off. I installed OS X 10.2 with the eMac cd, and it kept it's horribly small cryptic display resolution and refused to take up the whole display. bleh, fucking resore cd's. Then, after I installed, I ran System Update and when it got to the the 10.2.8 combined update it restarted. w00t. The OS X grey bootup screen appeared. And filled the entire display. I had a working iBook.
A Month later - I love it.
Instantly added applications: Firefox, iTerm (a much better terminal program), BitchX, GLQuake (networking support is wonderful)
Good things -
Almost NO crashes
Almost NO spyware
Great form-factor
Battery lasts 5+ hours
Built-in Optical audio-out jack
Built-in Firewire and DVI
Built-in 56k and 100bt Ethernet
Cons:
Requires Overpriced Airport card for WIFI (Mac Compliant USB adaptors are even few and far between and overpriced)
Light-Up Apple - Lights up when LCD backlight is on. Also allows sun and bright light to shine through and have a super-imposed apple watermark in the background. Maybe I'm too OCD, but this bothered me a tiny amount.
DVD/CD-RW drive refuses to read DVD+R media. Works fine with DVD-R, but no +R
Memory Configuration - Has 128mb onboard and a 256mb DIMM. Why can't it have two DIMMs? I will probably end up sticking a 512mb or 1024mb stick in it, but I'd rather have 512+256 than 512+128. Or I could go for 512+512 :D.
That's pretty much it. It's a great laptop, and it's becoming my favorite and most used.