Greg In The Desert

I’ve written about my DVD burner issues, first I had errors when burning DVDs. So I tried cleaning it with limited success, DVD burning worked with limited success for a while. A few weeks ago I started having problems burning CDs with iTunes saying there were problems with the hardware. I gave up and decided it was time to start shopping.

With my 1Ghz PowerBook being about 2.5 years old, it is getting time to start looking at all new hardware. With the problems the latest crop of PowerBooks have and lack of G5, I can’t say I find it worth the near $2500 I would be spending on it. Plus I think the G5 will be here within the year. Therefore buying a new one is not recommended.

My options then is to replace the superdrive. I was pleasantly surprised to find that OWC has the MercuryPBG4 SuperDrive for $179.99, pretty cheap considering the specs: 2.4X Speed DVD+R DL Writing, 8X Speed DVD-R Writing, 4X Speed DVD-RW Writing, 8X Speed +R Writing, 4X Speed +RW Writing, 8X Speed DVD-ROM Reading, 3X DVD-RAM, 24X Speed CD-R Writing, 10X Speed CD-RW Writing, 24X Speed CD-ROM Reading. There are many more things this new drive can do than my original drive. An order was placed with 2nd day shipping.

The installation wasn’t that difficult for me, since I had taken this apart before to clean it. However the instructions that came with the drive were for the pre 1Ghz models, which looked like they had different procedures. I took everything off the drive that wasn’t on the new drive and put it on the new drive, including a plastic bezel that fits on the front, that was also missing from the instructions. Once installed it was recognized by MacOS and iDVD without problems. I did need to install PatchBurn for iTunes to recognize it.

There was a side effect I did not expect. Before I was able to burn to a variety of brands of DVDs, however only the Apple brand DVDs would play on my DVD player. I have a lot of different brands I experimented with including some on a spindle. I wrote this off the the fact that I have a very old DVD player (I bought the first 5 disk DVD player Sony came out with, cost about $1000 at the time. How’s that for early adopter?). Now all the DVDs I burnt with various brands of DVDs all playerd on my DVD player perfectly. Not sure if this is because of the new hardware or newer software (iLife), but I’m very happy with the results.

I’m not done with my “forced upgrades”. Yesterday I discovered that my battery in my Powerbook no longer charges, I should say it thinks it’s charged but has 0% capacity. I tired zapping the PRAM and resetting the PMU. The chip in the battery sometimes needs reset and this can be done by letting the battery completely run down. But it already is run down, as soon as the computer is unplugged it goes to sleep. That should reset it but doesn’t have any effect. I ordered a NewerTech replacement battery from OWC. That was a $149 I didn’t want to spend but a laptop without battery power is not a laptop. I’m not completely sure it is the battery but I have no way to test it.

The next item to go would be the hard drive. I’ve started looking around for prices. I’m pretty unimpressed that 2.5 inch hard drives haven’t significantly increased in capacity during the last 2.5 years. I will probably stay with the 60GB, and depending on what performance I want it will cost between $100-$200. Not that cheap!

The computer has served me well, I hope it continues to serve me well for another year.