Recently my iBook has been giving me a lot of trouble. It started to randomly stop charging, the connections were loose inside the plug head of the power adaptor, bad design. So I called Apple told them my problem and they sent out a new one, but they sent me the bit that goes into the power adaptor, not the adaptor itself which i needed. After a bit of complaining they eventually sent me a new adaptor and all was well.


You could say I have myself to blame for my next set of troubles with my iBook. I decided the 40GB hard disk was no where near enough space for me, I had basically filled it up after the first month of having the iBook and had been working with 2-3 free GB of space ever since. So I got myself a new 160GB hard disk to upgrade it with. I had done my research and got all the right parts I needed for the upgrade. iBooks are notoriously hard to take apart, but I had read the guides several times and was confident I could do it without any hiccups. Having already read guides so many times before hand, when it came to actually taking my iBook apart, I wasn’t as careful as I should’ve been and didn’t exactly follow the guide step by step.

Anyway, when it came to take the palm rest bit off, I yanked the power socket off the logic board along with it, this was followed by about a minute of swearing and then it was of to google to find a fix. Seems like I wasn’t the only one who had done this and I probably won’t be the last, it’s not that hard to solder it back on to the logic board.

So eventually after failing many times I managed to get the tiny little socket soldered back on to the logic board and it powered up again. Once that was sorted it wasn’t hard to swap the old hard disk for the new one and install Tiger.

Everything was working fine for a couple of days and then it started randomly crashing when I picked it up or even moved it slightly. I thought it was something to do with my dodgy soldering at first, so I took it apart again and ripped the power socket off the logic board again when I took the top off. I swear that little plug is impossible to get out of the socket, not with the socket attached to the mother board anyway. I soldered it on again, made sure it was solid this time and put it back together again. No more than 5 minutes later, it crashes when I pick it up.


So I took it apart again! This time I disconnected everything and started up with only one component connected at a time, while jiggling the machine about with it’s insides hanging out, trying to figure out which bit was making it crash. Turns out it was the airport/bluetooth card. Without it everything works fine, which is quite bloody annoying as I use both airport and bluetooth a lot.

Now I have to compute from my living room on the sofa connected to my wireless router via a network cable. Can’t seem to find anywhere in the UK that sells the part I need.

And that’s about it, I swear if this machine gives me any more problems I’ll throw it out the bloody window.