This follows on from my previous PowerBook Repair post in which we replaced a hard drive on a 17inch PowerBook.
My friend Adrian hasn’t had much luck with the PowerBooks that he’s owned. The first one got stolen several weeks after we replaced its hard drive. His insurance replacement has been working fine, then he fell asleep and dropped it off his bed. A few dents later, frustration, a quick search on eBay and a thorough read of an iFixit Guide brings us to the point of taking apart a fairly new PowerBook.

For those interested in reading the article and seeing the accompanying pictures, you’ll have to click the continue reading link.
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How to fry a PowerBook quick and easily.

Attach a power cable to your cable modem.

Yesterday i invested in a digital TV receiver adaptor for my PowerBook.
The initial setup was fairly straight forward and involved installing EyeTV and then plugging the box in.

I managed to get the UK free-view channels displaying quite easily by doing a scan with EyeTV, but for some reason, most of the channels kept flickering and weren’t watch-able at all.
I thought maybe i’d gotten a dodgy piece of hardware so i asked Adrian to give it a try on his Powerbook. Fortunately, it worked fine on his mac, so i did some digging around and reinstalling to see if i could get any channels to show correctly on my mac.
I didn’t manage to find any information online so i looked at the differences between my mac and Adrians. The only noticeable difference was that i had FileVault enabled on my user account.
I setup another user account this morning under my powerbook and tried EyeTV to see if FileVault was the culprit and sure enough, it was.

To cut a long story short, it turns out that this digital tv receiver won’t work that well if FileVault is enabled. It must be something to do with the encryption process being done on the fly and the video signal getting interrupted by that.

Adrian’s PowerBook hard drive failed a couple of weeks ago so yesterday we replaced it with a brand spanking new drive.
We thought it would be interesting to photo document the process so if anyone else was in a similar situation, they could do the same to their PowerBook.
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I’ve just installed Apples Front Row on my PowerBook thanks to Andrew’s Front Row Enabler.

I quite like the way Front Row zooms in and out when you activate and deactivate. I tried to capture this roughly with the screenshot to the left. If you click it, you’ll get a larger version of the image.

It’s a shame that Apple have limited this piece of software to newer macs and people with older ones have to rely on someone elses piece of software to get it to work. Andrew had an email through from Apple’s legal department a while ago, which stopped him from distributing his enabler, but he’s just recently brought it back online.