Results tagged “Apple” from Photoethnography.com Blog

The PC extended warrantee company SquareTrade has published some really interesting data on laptop / netbook failure rates, based on their own data from 30,000 of their covered machines. What's interesting to me is the fragility of netbooks. One of my own netbooks (an Asus EEE PC 900) has died, which is a shame since it's one of the most reliable brands.

So I guess I'm not the only one with hard drive problems:

Apple to Replace Bad Hard Drives

Apple, meet Toyota.

The computer company, while not formally issuing a recall, says it will replace for free “a very small percentage” of hard drives that are prone to failure in some MacBook laptops sold from May 2006 to December 2007."

February 19, 2010, 7:35 PM
By STEPHEN WILLIAMS

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/apple-to-replace-bad-hard-drives/?em

My buddy Nate sent me the following link:

http://www.iphoneography.com/

You've probably seen this, but just in case!
Jarvis has a neat set of iphone photo apps and filters for the iPhone that mimic polaroids, 1974 gelatin, etc.

Hadn't seen it. Quite cool. I want an iphone app that manufactures SX70 film (the real stuff, not virtual), though.

I recently had to change out the hard drive on my partner's iBook G4. It's a tremendously difficult procedure with (what seemed like) over a hundred screws that need to get removed in the proper order. iFixit has a great guide series for disassembling and reassembling your Macs and iPods, including a very useful screw reminder sheet that I used to cellotape all the screws to in the order that I removed them: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/

I put the old drive in a portable USB enclosure and used SuperDuper! to clone the old drive to the new one. Everything worked spankingly and my partner now has a 100 gb drive to put her huge iPhoto database on! And an external 60 gb USB drive for backups.

You'll need an assortment of teeny Phillips screwdrivers (including a Torx, although I used a hex driver) and a "spudger" or a little lever tool that helps you crack the iBook case. iFixit will sell you one, I used one that I had from my camera repair toolkit. A small set of tweezers was also great for picking up small parts. My screwdrivers are magnetized, which also helps with the small screws.

p.s. I wish Apple made the iBook easier to maintain! You shouldn't have to take out 100+ screws just to change out the hard drive!