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Is my iBook dying?

I

ILoveiBooks

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 13, 2005
33
0
Hey guys,

I have a quick question; hopefully someone can help me out.

I have a year old (October 20th) iBook here and I fear that the hard drive is failing. It's been acting really erratically for the past few weeks. Programs have been randomly shutting themselves down, Safari has been freezing a lot but the thing that really set me off today was when I switched users and everything on my screen tinted blue. It's happened before, when I was playing with the colour profiles, but this time it was very random. I couldn't change it without restarting. It's also been VERY slow with only Safari, iTunes and Adium open. Also, I can barely play videos (in Quicktime or on websites like YouTube) as they are often very choppy, but not always.

Basically, it's really starting to frustrate me :mad:. I can't have this thing die on me anytime soon.

I checked the disk permissions and such, they came back fine. Anything else I can do?

Any suggestions would be great :)
 
Have you tried running Apple Hardware Test?

This doesn't really sound like typical symptoms of a hard drive failure.
 
Warbrain said:
Logic board possibly, but that wouldn't make total sense if it was. Is it a 14" or a 12" iBook?
Click to expand...

It is a 12".

aquajet said:
Have you tried running Apple Hardware Test?

This doesn't really sound like typical symptoms of a hard drive failure.
Click to expand...

Where exactly would this be? I should know this one...:eek:
 
ILoveiBooks said:
It is a 12".
Click to expand...

I was wondering since I have a 14" iBook from the same revision and I've already had logic board issues, but that was within the first two months of warranty. I still think that it might be a logic board issue. Try running the Apple Hardware Check and see if everything looks good.

This reminds me that I probably should do the same to my iBook and repair permissions one day.
 
ILoveiBooks said:
Where exactly would this be? I should know this one...:eek:
Click to expand...

It'll most likely be on your restore disk. Put restore disk 1 in your machine and hold down the <option> key after you reboot. It'll give you a menu to select from available boot partitions. Select "AHT" or "Apple Hardware Test".

Follow the on-screen instructions. They're pretty self explanatory.
 
Well, I did a Hardware test.

Everything came back as fine.

Maybe I'm just impatient and imagining it. :p

So I maybe need more RAM? I only have 512.
 
Have you run Disk Utilities? Verify your drive (after a while it really can help) and repair permissions. This is very basic stuff.

And BUY MORE RAM!!!!! Buy another 1gb and be happy. Don't make the mistake I made and buy another 512, and then later buy a 1gb chip (wasting money).
 
Well my iBook's logic board is broken I think... although I'm still using it. The only thing that it ruined was that 1/3 of my screen at the bottom is just a solid straight light across in white or black pixels that doesn't show up. Looks like the display is broken in a very precise area. Works fine in an external monitor though... so I dunno what gives. Mine however is one of the very first, 3 years old and some. This happened about a month or two ago.
 
ILoveiBooks said:
Well, I did a Hardware test.

Everything came back as fine.

Maybe I'm just impatient and imagining it. :p

So I maybe need more RAM? I only have 512.
Click to expand...

You might try opening Activity Monitor, located in your Utilities folder. Check to see if there are any processes that are consistently hogging your CPU. Also look at your RAM usage and see how much free and inactive ram you have available. If your page outs number in the several thousands, then you might need more RAM.
 
haiggy said:
Well my iBook's logic board is broken I think... although I'm still using it. The only thing that it ruined was that 1/3 of my screen at the bottom is just a solid straight light across in white or black pixels that doesn't show up. Looks like the display is broken in a very precise area. Works fine in an external monitor though... so I dunno what gives. Mine however is one of the very first, 3 years old and some. This happened about a month or two ago.
Click to expand...

If it works fine with an external monitor, then most likely your LCD panel is toast.
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Have you run Disk Utilities? Verify your drive (after a while it really can help) and repair permissions. This is very basic stuff.

And BUY MORE RAM!!!!! Buy another 1gb and be happy. Don't make the mistake I made and buy another 512, and then later buy a 1gb chip (wasting money).
Click to expand...

I definately agree. Buy more ram! Im not saying there isnt anything wrong with your ibook. There very well could be. But buy more ram anyway. I had 256 for the longest time (ibook only a year old) then i had 512 for a while (not much better than 256) and now i have 1.25 gigs of ram and imovie hd has never worked better! This thing flys now, i even have to strap it down whenever i use it haha. Good luck!
 
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