I have seen the insides of my iBook. I have seen what happens when a hard drive fails while you are logged in and using it. And I can tell you that the screws are that long for a reason, and that it is easy to to tear the ribbon cable that connects the touch pad to the mother board. Ugh…
The gist is that I have an iBook again, but one with a USB trackball plugged into it, and one which doesn’t know it has a DVD / CD-RW because I managed to break both of those ribbon cables while replacing the hard drive. I’m wondering how much trouble it will be to get those replacement parts.
Anyhow, that, among other things is the reason for 6 weeks of silence – like anyone notices.