A few days ago, I purchased a M-Audio Firewire audio interface to replace (or at least complement) my old Edirol SD-90 USB module. My main motivation was to improve the stability of my Mac-based audio recording environment. The SD-90 is a pretty neat unit, but the Mac drivers have been rather unstable, triggering a few crashes and often stopping to process the audio. This gets annoying really fast, and I went for Firewire over USB this time as I thought it would help to have it on a separate bus - I already have quite a few USB devices. Not to mention those are usually higher quality pieces of hardware with lower latency for recording.

Well, I received the Firewire 410 yesterday, installed the drivers on my Powerbook, and it seemed to work more or less fine. Then I went home and did the same thing on my Intel iMac, and all hell started to get loose. The latest drivers from their site just don't work at all; the unit kept resetting itself and crashing everything. I tried downgrading to the previous revision of the Mac drivers, and I managed to get it to work for a few minutes, but eventually it kept crashing again. This is very annoying. This seems like a very good piece of hardware, with very low noise level compared to the Edirol, and some very cool routing and mixing capabilities, however the Mac drivers really, really are terrible. And that's what I was trying to improve in the first place!

I am going to give it a few more tries over the weekend but I may have to return it and get something more standard instead. If they can't write decent drivers for their own hardware, I'd rather go for a standard Firewire audio interface that doesn't require them at all, like maybe the Presonus Firebox. Edirol also makes some decent comparable hardware, but I'm trying to move away from them since I've had mixed experience with their own software. I just want something that is reliable and that I can easily take with me on the road if needed.

So, there was an happy ending to my laptop woes. I went to Sears on Monday and found a screw extractor kit there. As a side note, driving to downtown Santa Monica on a sunny holiday is in itself quite a challenge.

Using these special drill bits I was able to get one of the two screws out. The other wouldn't come out, so I proceeded to obliterate it completely instead. Fortunately I didn't break anything, and these two screws won't be missed. I then easily managed to remove the rest of the components, replace the hard drive, and put the whole thing back together. Power it back on, and voilà! I have been busy reinstalling MacOS X and all the applications I regularly use on this laptop, not to mention restoring my files from the last backup.

( Picture of my open laptop )

It's rather a pain in the ass but it seems to have been worth it. That drive feels faster, and I'll have a cleaner installation. I'm even taking this opportunity to turn this laptop into a mobile music workstation, with a full installation of Logic Express and all the other software I have on my desktop iMac. This will help lots if I have to move around to do some recording.

In a side note, the Amazing Journey concert on Saturday was really amazing, and my full review will probably come later today. I posted a video of the end of the concert, when all the musicians destroy their instruments, which is getting linked all over the place! It got more than 6,000 views in the first couple of days, which is rather incredible compared to the previous videos I posted on Google. :)

So here I am, with a brand new replacement 100GB hard drive for my Powerbook, and I've literally spent all day trying to put it in, to no avail. Everything was going well up to the point where I was supposed to remove a couple of really tiny Phillips screws within the battery compartment, and I've been fighting with them all day. Even worse, it looks like the threads on the heads have worn out from my efforts, and I'll probably have to drill them out.

Very frustrating as everything else was going smoothly. I could reach the old drive if only I could get rid of these screws, which are the last things to hold the cover of the main board. Grrrr. So right now I'm left with an almost completely taken apart laptop, with the old defective drive still in place.

My hope is to find one of these screw extractor kits tomorrow, and that these will do the job. I don't really care if I can salvage the screws or not, there are already plenty holding that thing together. I just want to get done with this and get to reinstalling the software. :-/

If this laptop was still under warranty, I would have considered taking it to the Apple store to have it done. If the worst happens, I may still have to do that...

*mumbles swear words*

Shit. It looks like the hard drive in my laptop is dying a slow death. And these G4 Powerbooks are notoriously difficult to service yourself, that will be quite an adventure. Ah well, at least it's still functional enough that I should be able to back up my data. :-/