Most people that have been using Macs for any length of time have one or two older machines that they aren’t sure what to do with. Re-purposing them is great way to avoid dumping them into a landfill and fortunately most Macs from 2002 and on still work great as long as you aren’t trying to use Final Cut Pro or Adobe’s CS3/4 on them.
In my case I wanted to give my wife an easy to use Mac for those times when she wants to quickly look something up online. Usually it has to do with something seen on TV that she wants to verify or find more information about and in the past she either goes to the other room where our kid’s G5 iMac is or grabs my MacBook Pro. Usually no problem, but sometimes I’M using the fershlugginer thing or it isn’t convienant to go to the other room.
So, old iBook to the rescue. Its 14-inch screen is big enough for most web pages, it has an internal Airport card, and it’s not MY MacBook Pro. But it has a little problem. The optical drive (non-SuperDrive) is kaput. So loading anything from disc means I have to set either the iMac or my MBP to target mode and connect that way. Not exactly an elegant solution.
I took it into a local Apple store to find out what it would cost to get it fixed and was quoted a price of $300. Actually not a bad deal since that covers anything and everything that could be wrong (aside from the display), but it’s still a lot to spend on a now 5-year old laptop. Other World Computing to the rescue. They have a FireWire (needed for booting as USB-based drives won’t do it) CD/DVD optical drive for as little as about $71.99. Since so much software is available online now it wasn’t that big a deal to do without, but it’s nice to know that OWC has your back when things like this happens.
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