This isn’t a guide on how to rip apart your PowerBook, its simply a right up of my experiences and a chance to show you some pictures of a this beautiful machine with no clothes on! After my stock hard drive got to a certain point I decided that an upgrade was required, my choice of upgrade; 120GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3. This is not only an upgrade in speed (4200RPM to 5400RPM) but also a doubling of capacity (you can work that one out).
The drive arrived in pristine condition and I began the process of collecting together the necessary tools, at this point I’ll say that this wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the the PB FixItGuide its certainly not perfect but it covers enough basics to make the process fairly simple, not only that but the Screw Guide is a life saver, there being a large number of screws involved in the process.
After going through the guide step by step removing each screw with as much care as the next and placing them gently in the correct order in which they were removed I began to see the insider, lifting the keyboard panel is incredibly difficult but you eventually realise that its not as fragile as you think, just don’t yank otherwise you might have a mess on your hands. After removing the cables from the keyboard panel I stared in amazement at how beautifully arranged the inside of the PowerBook is, cables taped down and everything neatly positioned. Removing the hard drive was easy and installing the new one just as simple, no jumpers no mass of cables.
After putting all the screws back very carefully, following the guide backwards of course, I was happy enough that I could plug it back in and began the process of restoring. Obviously I had backed up to my LaCie before hand so restoring should be as simple as you can imagine. After booting up to check that the drive was working I was greeted by the Sad Mac picture flashing a question mark, all is good so far! I whacked in my Tiger disc and it booted immediately, a full install and optimisation not taking much more than 10 minutes. After reboot I logged in and copied over the necessaries, in less than 30 minutes I was up and running, truly amazing.
Overall time taken, just under 3 and half hours, estimated time to do on a PC, just under 2 days.
If you’ve had any happy experiences with tasks that would be hell on PC’s let us know by commenting.
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The following comments have been added by readers:
Carl
9th November 2005, 13.06 pm
I replaced a hard drive a few years back in my Blueberry iBook G3… It was absolute hell (my fault because I had none of the right tools and no guide), but only took about 3 hours. There were all kinds of thin aluminum guards which were actually very sharp and caused paper cuts. I had a bunch of extra screws, but it all worked out fine in the end.
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altorus
10th November 2005, 10.19 am
Well, in my experience of a PC laptop, a hard drive replacement took 10 minutes. It was not obfuscated in the middle of the machine, it had an external hatch to get to pull out and swap the drives.
That was a compaq.
From all i’ve seen its as easy on a Dell
This is not mac bashing, just well informing the zealots.
Obfuscation of what should be an easily user replacebale piece of kit is nasty. A simple hard drive swap out should not take over 3 hours.
Don’t get my wrong, i l;ove my G4 powerbook, but there are easier laptops to work on.
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Michael Superczynski
10th November 2005, 14.54 pm
“right up”?
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