(no subject)

[jarandhel]

This will be my final entry from the laptop formerly known as Tetsusaiga. Technically, I'm writing from Dusk's laptop, Caliburnus, but I've just performed surgery on his laptop to replace its failing hard drive with the one from my long-dead laptop. So far, things seem to be working, though it's obviously a temporary fix and won't hold up to very hard use. Turns out iBook and Powerbook hard drives aren't quite the same size, and it's not secured in place very well. Obviously, this computer is not going to be used as a true laptop for the foreseeable future. But it's good enough to keep it going, for a while. And I'm taking the opportunity to rescue all of my old data from this machine.

Tetsusaiga: December 2003 - February 2006, with a brief reawakening in October 2006. May its spirit rest in peace, even as its body gives new life to another.

Comments

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

Try using Sculpey to reinforce the drive mounts. Or double-sided foam tape.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't those interfere with the airflow of a laptop?

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

It would depend on the airflow inside the laptop.

I don't mean potting the drive in the bay, I mean a bit here and a bit there to keep it from wiggling around too much. A couple of extenders at the corners.

*nods*

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

If they're using standard notebook IDE hard drives (never mucked much in the innards of a Mac laptop so I can't tell if it's comparable to repairs on PC laptops) you *should* be able to swap the drive caddies/drive cages and get things working.

And good to know that the guts of your old box are living on in another box, at any rate. (I think all of us have been working on lappies this weekend--though in my case much more of a software tweakage in installing Ubuntu Edgy on this thing, which is actually behaving better with Wing in that I don't have to tweak nearly as much :D)

Re: *nods*

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Edgy is great, it really is, but I've been playing around lately with xubuntu a bit. Thanks to the good Doctor. A lot of the same power, and also a bit better in terms of overhead and therefor speed. I've needed that working on some of these older machines.

Re: *nods*

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Xubuntu *is* nice for older machines, I'll agree on that. (Whilst Wing has no problem whatsoever running Ubuntu, if I set up a dedicated Linux box on one of the older laptops it'll probably be a Kubuntu box if not Gentoo.)

Re: *nods*

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

And, lest tlttlotd read this and wonder how on earth he got me using Xubuntu when he's never mentioned it to me at all, he was talking to me about using a less resource intensive window manager under gentoo and my brain extrapolated the rest.

Re: *nods*

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Oh, and no, the hard drives are slightly different sizes so the cages don't line up right with the holes on the respective hard drives if you put them in the opposite laptops. Macs are HORRID when it comes to standardization. Hell, half of the iBooks innards are some sort of horrible thin aluminum that bends if you look at it wrong while taking it apart, while the powerbook is more solidly constructed... if I ever go Mac again, I'm getting the MacBook Pro which appears to carry on the tradition of the powerbook rather than the iBook. (The regular MacBooks appear to carry on the tradition of the iBook, sadly, so no new black iBook for me.)