Calling all Mac tech geeks: The case of the slanted iBook [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Late last night (isn't it always late at night?) Safari crashed. No big deal. I'd just force quit. Wait, Mail, which I had open to check for messages from Japanese clients, was also crashing. When I tried to force quit, I saw that the Finder was also sporting that spinning beach ball. Wait, this isn't supposed to be possible.

Well, I rebooted using the Command/Control/On combination, and I got nothing but that circular thing going round and round under the Apple symbol. Tried again. Same thing. Tried several times. Same thing every time. Tried Extensions Off. Silly me, should have realized that this is irrelevant for OS X. Looked around for reference books to remind myself how to zap the PRAM. Nope, same result. I tried starting up from the system disk. Nothing happened. Nothing worked.

Since I was in the midst of a major job that required me to turn in segments every day at 6PM my time, I took my old computer out and e-mailed the client to e-mail back the work I had done so far. Okay, at least that worry was settled, even though the old computer has an older version of MS Office and doesn't really handle the file well. (This file is a prime example of the irritating Japanese tendency to use Excel as a word processor and to ask to have the translation overwritten in the Excel file, which means that correcting an error in a cell requires me to redo the entire cell, but I digress...)

I was thinking, "Hard disk crash--and after only 15 months, too!" I thought I'd give it one more shot before going to bed. I picked up the frozen computer from the place where I had set it aside before hooking up the old iMac, and suddenly, I began to see very, very slow progress. The blue background appeared with a cursor. The OS X icon appeared. Soon I noticed that each time I tilted the iBook, it would speed up. Finally, it was fully booted, and I had all my functions back. (The first thing I did was to back up everything I had worked on that day.)

This morning, the iBook started up just fine, but it tends to be slow, and the beach ball appears way to frequently, although it disappears when I tilt the iBook off horizontal, and the requested action happens immediately (window closes, menu comes down, etc.)

So my current thinking is that this is a hardware problem, not a software problem, and that the hard disk is unbalanced somehow. Is this a reasonable thought, and if so, is repairing it a huge hassle?