Wouldn’t it be nice if a new year would also mean leaving all your old troubles behind? I’d like the year 2010 to stop the trend of my stuff breaking. Which is not cool. My trusty old warhorse of a laptop, the iBook G4 suffered a hard drive failure recently. Adding to a list of breakdowns already including a hard drive, computer power supply, bluetooth keyboard and printer.

I had all important files backed up, so data loss isn’t the problem. It’s replacing the drive. While modern Apple notebooks provide easy access to the hard drive, that was not the case in the company’s old-school hardware. It’s no picnic on PowerBooks and even less for iBooks. In fact, replacing the hard drive on my iBook actually requires disassembling the entire laptop. Not kidding, no easy-access hatches here.

Oh, and it’s a 2,5″ PATA-drive. Which means the replacement is harder to find and more expensive than the modern SATA-drives. So, disassembling a laptop and a hunt for an overpriced drive: sign me up for a fun project.