So, armed with a combo drive and a 512 MB SO-DIMM, I was ready to upgrade the crap out of my iBook. By that, I mean keep track of the screws while did most of the work. But, this is neither here nor there.

I had acquired both from ebay, and I was boosted by the fact that the machine had powered itself on, while closed, booted, and gone into sleep mode while I was off galavanting around the Flint and Detroit areas for family fun. So, it was working again, but the upgrade required a power-down. I knew it was risky, but I was bound and determined to squeeze every last drop of cool out of this thing. 1 GB of RAM and the ability to burn CDs was just the kind of cool I wanted. (cool)

This is where things took a bit of a turn for the worse. After tearing apart the entire laptop, layer by layer, we discovered that this particular generation of iBook does not have a second RAM slot for its onboard RAM. Nope, it has actual onboard RAM. Well, at least we could upgrade to the Combo Drive, right? Sure!

But it won’t turn on. Again. Same exact problem. *sigh* So, I have activated the actuators, perpetuated the perpetuators, set the gears to grindin’, reversed the polarities, increased the transporter buffer, re-routed power through the secondary coupling, and have decided to part out the iBook and sell its bits on eBay to fund a newer, better, faster laptop.

If you know anybody who’s interested in these sort of bits, please feel free to send them here. Also, please do the same if you know people looking for used White Wolf books. :)

In the meantime, I am not without a machine, thanks to . His timely gift of a used tower is much appreciated. I’ve already brought my old 17″ CRT monitor out of storage (AKA gathering dust on the floor next to my desk), put some extra RAM in it that I had lying around, and the Ubuntu install was completing when I left the house this morning. I still need to find the video card drivers and find a better place for my printer, but all is well.

So, the electronics saga continues. I’m not sure why this happens to me in cycles (power supply and motherboard on my last desktop gave out on me simultaneously, power wouldn’t turn on with the iBook…), but apparently I’m rolling with it well this time. :)