![]() The screws were bad enough, but worse were the four interconnections that I had to disconnect in order to complete the task. Those 25 screws came in about a half dozen sizes, so as I removed each screw, I dropped it into a compartment of a divided parts box and labeled each compartment with a sticky yellow note to indicate where the screw had come from. This was not my father's Oldsmobile! Twenty-five very tiny Phillips and Torx screws had to be removed in order to take the computer apart and remove the dead drive. The new drive arrived Tuesday morning and that evening, I tackled the installation. The dead drive was a 100 Gbyte drive, so I gained 60 Gbytes for my trouble.) (The only good news in all this is that this was a size upgrade. The hard drive swap looked a little difficult, but I've worked on worse problems, so Monday morning I ordered a new 160-Gbyte drive and had it shipped via next day delivery. The web site is and it has online guides for fixing a variety of problems for various Mac and iPod models. Then I found a web site that described in detail how to replace a hard drive in a G4 17-inch Powerbook. I have fixed a lot of computer problems in the past including replacing hard drives, but I have never worked on a G4 Powerbook and the task looked a little foreboding, so I was leaning toward going to the Apple Store on Monday. What to do now? I had two choices: take the computer to the Apple Store for repair or fix it myself. I quit the install, ran some additional tests, and concluded that there was no saving the hard disk. When I returned a half hour later, the installation program was only 6% complete and indicated that it would take 28 hours to complete the installation. The installation program started normally, so I let it do its thing while I went away to do other things (normally the install should take about 30 minutes). That was not a good sign, but I proceeded to reinstall the OS anyway. Sometimes it appeared on the desktop, sometimes it did not. After reinitialization, the hard disk icon on the computer desktop acted flaky. I figured that some file on the hard disk was corrupt and the hard disk was still redeemable, so I tried to reinitialize the hard disk and reinstall the OS. It is not a hard job, but it is time-consuming. I do an automatic weekly backup every Sunday morning (using Retrospect), so I did not fear losing much except a week's worth of work, but I did fear having to reinstall everything. I booted up off the OS install CD-ROM and after running some tests and the disk utility software, it was apparent that something was wrong with the hard disk. Instead, my Mac would not load the operating system and was hung up in limbo. I had experienced this problem two or three times in the past two months and eventually things get so slow that I would have to reboot the computer to return to normal.Īs expected, things got so slow that I had to reboot, but this time the reboot did not solve the problem. When I sat down at my G4 17-inch Powerbook last Saturday to read and answer e-mails and do other assorted tasks, I noticed that everything was running in slow motion. Please feel free to pass it along to anyone in the astronomy community and enjoy!" I downloaded the book and after perusing it, I recommend it highly. It's beautifully illustrated and contains many special features, such as anotated lunar maps. Today, slashdot had a story titled "A Free Guide to Naked-Eye Astronomy." Tammy Plotner, president of Warren Rupp Observatory, writes "Are you looking for all the best of what's up in the night sky for the year 2007? Then be my guest and download my free e.book - '365 Days of SkyWatching'! (Brought to you courtesy of The Universe Today.) Each day is specifically geared to give you the best of what can be seen with the unaided eye, binoculars, and small telescopes and even has challenge objects for seasoned observers. After I saw everything I could see with that telescope, I bugged my folks for an upgrade and eventually they bought me a less inexpensive no-name refractor, which I still own and use today. As a kid, I had a blast with a inexpensive no-name refractor telescope that my folks bought me for Christmas many years ago. Astronomy was my first scientific interest.
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