Worth fixing powerbook?

[Jigga Beef]

I have a four-year-old 17” inch Powerbook that is in need of some restoration. The optical drive does not work, the battery lasts all of 3 minutes when its not plugged in and the firewire ports don’t work. So since the optical drive and firewire ports are unusable I cannot install Leopard, which I would like to do. Also disk utility says the hard drive needs permissions repaired but I would need to insert the install disk to fix them and since I don’t have disk warrior or drive genius already installed it seems like a problem is going to happen soon.

I’ve seen new optical drives for about $200 dollars, and internal hard drives for about $50 dollars. The battries i have seen have been about $80. Are there other cheaper solutions? (Ebay obviously)

I don’t use this computer for that much, so the hard drive doesn’t need to be large. I just bought a Mac Pro so ideally the next technology purchase I was planning to make was more RAM for that but if I can fix my Powerbook in a more affordable way I would do it. In the meantime I have moved all my important data to my new computer and uninstalled most of my third party applications giving the powerbook a lot of free hard drive space. Is it worth putting the money into it or just using it until it fails?

The screen is also very loose or wobbly, an apple genius a few years ago told me there is nothing to do to fix this

 

[gumbyx84]

Its really up to you. I know I like to have a laptop with me when I go away (visit the folks, go to girlfriends house, etc.), so to me it would be worth it. You said you don't use it much, so I don't know if this applies to you.

Personally, I would do some hunting and see how much parts would be online. If you are comfortable installing parts yourself, you don't have to worry about paying repair costs. If not, then you will need to find a repair center in your area and price it out. If it comes to over ~$400, I would just invest in a netbook. You can make it a hackintoish and won't cost much more (maybe even less) then the cost for replacement parts and labor.