OK, i ordered a MacBook Pro 1.67Ghz about 2 weeks ago and lo and behold apple today suprised me with a free upgrade to a 1.83Ghz machine at no extra cost to my person. Im not complaining. Not one little bit.

see some more info here and here.

-Richie

Recently my Apple iBook G4’s CD Drive has been creating a sticky mess on the bottom of any CD that i care to insert into the drive. So last weekend, determined to get to the bottom if the problem proceeded to pull apart my ibook and to fix the CD-Rom Drive.

In order to do this one must remove a whole list of parts just to be able to get to the drive in order to remove it. In no particular order:

• Battery
• Keyboard and RAM Shield
• Airport Extreme Card
• Memory Card
• Bottom Case
• Bottom Shield
• DC-In Board
• Top case
• Top Shield

(Go here for more info on pulling apart all sorts of Apple gear. Service Manual’s )

The results of doing this are as shown in this photo.

Next came removing the CD-Rom drive from the Metal frame.

And finally opening up the drive to work out the problem and correct it if at all possible.

Turns out that it was a sticky felt pad (on the left in this photo) that had some-how managed to work itself loose from the bottom of the drive and invert itself, placing the sticky side towards and disk that was inserted.

After all that ithen had to re-asemble the drive and put the entire machine back together again! All up it took about 3 hours, however i have a working cd-drive again which is a good thing.

till next time,
Richie.