Oh Show Me the Way to the Next Logic Board

Woo-hoo! My replacement logic board has arrived!

Those of you who have been avidly following this blog (self-deception is a wonderful thing, isn't it?) will remember my comment about having a disassembled iBook lying around. And I bet you thought it was just a throw-away line to allow me to link to that Mac tablet thing. Well, it wasn't.

Wintermute, my snow iBook G3, gave up the ghost last February after three and a half years of sterling service. Now, this particular generation of iBooks, it turns out, was rather prone to failure, so much so in fact that Apple extended their warranties and introduced a replacement scheme. Not that anybody bothered to tell me. What exactly does Apple do with our registration details? Would one "by-the-way your laptops about to snuff it?" e-mail have killed them? It would at least have gone some way towards making-up for all those "buy your loved one an iPod this non-specific festive-style seasonal-period" messages they're currently bombarding me with.

This model iBook was susceptible to two different faults which, helpfully, produced the same symptoms of graphics errors - random tearing and corruption - followed by total screen blankness. The first fault was due to wear-and-tear of the inverter (and I'm sure I don't have to explain to you exactly what that means), and meant that you could still use the iBook with an external monitor or in target disk mode. The second was due to the video chip working loose and meant you now owned a very pretty, if rather small, polycarbonate tea tray. Naturally, my iBook fell victim to the latter.

(Well, at least it didn't start to discolour. Now that would have been just terrible...)

A slight shortage of funds back then meant that I didn't get the machine fixed at the time. It also didn't help that I couldn't find anywhere in the UK who sold the replacement logic boards. There were a few places which advertised a complete repair service, but I wasn't prepared to go down that route for reasons which will, believe me, make an enlightening and hilarious post at some time in the future. Still, I continued to look for a replacement board on and off over the rest of the year (during the grim time I refer to as "The Dark Days of the Acer" and which I really prefer not to think about if I can at all help it), occasionally checking eBay and so forth, but with no luck. Until a few weeks ago.

I stumbled across a company called PowerBook Medic who were offering reconditioned iBook motherboards. What with the tanking dollar and everything, the $399 they wanted for a 900Mhz model (a 200Mhz upgrade from my original) seemed rather reasonable, coming out at around £275 once Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs had added their 17.5%. A combination of Thanks Giving over there, and the aforementioned Excise men over here means it's taken about two and a half weeks to arrive, but that's still much faster than if I had, say, decided to download it through Bit Torrent (sorry, but were back to "970 days remaining"...).

Anyway, the board is now safely in my hands. I've given it a quick once-over and have established that it is indeed an iBook logic board as advertised, and not, for instance, a piece of cardboard painted green. I shall endeavour to install it either later tonight or tomorrow, and if you're very lucky I shall post some photos of the process here tomorrow. Oh, lucky you, how will you sleep tonight?