Paperweight
'Kay, so I replaced the G4's hard drive. I replaced it perfectly. And then, when I was putting it back together, which is when I was feeling pretty good and no longer acting like I was handling nitroglycerin...yeah, that's when I sort of managed to tear a socket off the logic board. Anyone out there know their way around a soldering iron?
This sucks. Not to disparage the Asus, whose keyboard I'm gaining a little more comfort with, but, without a more useful OS, I'm crippled in everything from listening to KLCC/Eugene public radio-via-internet on weekends (when I'm too lazy to get up in time to listen to Weekend Edition in my own time zone) to doing my taxes. (Turbotax for Linux? I think not.)
So now we enter the miserable realm of price calculus. Is new hard drive ($ already spent; the iBook did not, in the end, give up its goods) + Genius Bar rates + chance that the problem, after socket re-attachment, wasn't the hard drive + humiliation of explaining to the Geniuses what happened less than, or greater than, the cost of a new (that is; used) PB?
I hate math.
This sucks. Not to disparage the Asus, whose keyboard I'm gaining a little more comfort with, but, without a more useful OS, I'm crippled in everything from listening to KLCC/Eugene public radio-via-internet on weekends (when I'm too lazy to get up in time to listen to Weekend Edition in my own time zone) to doing my taxes. (Turbotax for Linux? I think not.)
So now we enter the miserable realm of price calculus. Is new hard drive ($ already spent; the iBook did not, in the end, give up its goods) + Genius Bar rates + chance that the problem, after socket re-attachment, wasn't the hard drive + humiliation of explaining to the Geniuses what happened less than, or greater than, the cost of a new (that is; used) PB?
I hate math.
4 Comments:
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Anonymous said...
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- 6:05 PM
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fedward said...
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- 10:44 PM
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esquiver said...
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- 10:05 PM
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esquiver said...
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- 10:10 PM
Post a CommentCan I just say that I'm *SO* impressed that you were able to get the bloody thing opened, much less replace the drive perfectly.
Sorry about all the stuff afterwards. I think the Genius Bar would be impressed with everything and would forgive you the socket tearing bit.
Probably the best way to approach this would be to get yourself to the Tuesday Night Clinic run by Washington Apple Pi ... in Rockville. Which I guess might be kind of hard for you since you don't drive (right?).
I don't have the surface-mount soldering skills to be of service, but they'd be a great place to start (probably better, in fact, than the Genius Bar as the Geniuses probably aren't equipped or inclined to do that sort of repair).
There are also instructions to be found on the web for installing Tiger on your Eee (I vaguely recall reading that people had got Leopard on too, but that Tiger worked better). If you're so inclined.
I:
Er, no. Any idiot can tear a laptop out of its casing (and a socket off the logic board). The cool bit is being able to put it all back together, and I'm so totally not there yet. But, ok: lesson learned. Much as I'd like to be the perfect frontierwifeperson, no, I can't grow all my own food, run my generator off my goats' methane, brew my own beer, bake my own bagels, and reassemble my own laptop. For now.
Fedsy:
Very cool about the Apple group. But, yeah, Rockville's a little far. I couldn't believe that thing about Tiger on the Eee, but I checked into it, and yeah, you're absolutely right. It isn't quite legal, of course, and, more damnably, it knocks out the wifi, which is one of the primary reasons to get one of these toys (crazy strong wifi). Does make me smile just to think of a mini-Tiger, though. I will eventually concede that I'm not going to ever get around to learning Linux and will put XP on the damn thing, but I'm not quite there yet.
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