I did manage to accomplish one useful task last week before shriveling up into an ineffective ball of sickness which only sought to end its own miserable existence… sorry, still a little cough-ridden. Anyway, I managed to replace the hard drive in Alyson’s PowerBook G4. I’d made the offer to do so earlier in the month, and after she returned from Flash Forward 2006 she dropped it off at my desk for the operation. (For the record, I did the upgrade on company time and property, but I promise I didn’t have anything pressing to do that day.)

The upgrade went smoothly for the most part, thanks to rather a large background in disassembling various Apple portables (stretching back to the Duos), and also to the handy guides produced by the crew at PBFixit. The main difficulty involved one reluctant screw — the one closest to the front of the computer in the topmost photo on this page — which was rather badly stripped before I even started on it. Eventually, a little patience, some very carefully applied WD-40, and a set of needlenose pliers broke the hold enough to safely unscrew it. The only other issue was getting the front of the case back together.

It’s fairly rare these days for me to actually do this kind of thing. As a general rule, I’m comfortable with most types of hardware work, but today I tend to avoid doing it unless I’m reasonably certain it’s something I can’t easily screw up. Especially on somebody else’s pride and joy. In this case, though, I knew that the costs of having a “professional” perform such an upgrade would likely exceed the cost of the drive itself, and it didn’t seem to be overly difficult based on my iBook experiences. Now that’s one seriously annoying computer to work inside.

I’m pleased to note that I seem to be much better at managing the stress that can accompany tasks such as this, compared to years past. I’m a lot more patient than I would have been, say, five years ago, running into a sticky screw. Part of it is experience with the physical aspect of doing this kind of thing, but a lot of it is mental too. In general, I think I’m a much calmer person on the inside than I used to be, when facing a minor adversity.

Anyway, I accomplished my main goal, which was to make a friend happy. Plus, I got to boost my always-in-need-of-reinforcement tech ego. Why, there’s nothing I can’t fix!